Downbreak

I like Minesweeper, but there is one thing I hate about it and that is those 50/50 chances that only depend on luck. You know like if with effort, focus and care you've logicaly thought through a hard set of classic Minesweeper and then at the end you're given a 50/50 chance no logic can help you with. You just win or lose no matter your skill, just pure luck and if you lose it's repeat that until you're luckily successful. I can live with some of this like in classic Minesweeper, but Downbreak intendedly (!) drastically increases the chances of a 50/50 chance situation to appear by placing walls in a way to create narrow 2 tile width corridors. To win a level you often need to win 4 or more (!) 50/50 chance situations, that's a 0,5^4=6,25% (1/16) chance. This is not a game about logical thinking, it's basically a casino. I don't like that and that's not what I expected. There are other good minesweeper titles which have no luck involved or have luck but mechanics to reduce it which becomes a new aspect of the play. Better try Demoncrawl, Tametsi or Hexcells.

Pillage towers while making sure not to drop it on your head by clicking on bombs. Although there are several modes, you must first play one tower in the campaign to unlock them. The game will take you through seven different zones. Each zone contains many towers with varying numbers of floors. Towers come in a variety of themes, however this is just decorative and has no effect on gameplay. The objective is to beat a tower by finishing all floors. This does not have to be completed in one sitting; you can save and resume later. The entire gameplay consists of clicking on crates scattered throughout the room. Each area or puzzle has a unique shape and size, but the basic mechanic doesn’t change. You always begin by clicking on a random crate. It will either smash apart and set off a chain reaction through all empty crates or explode. This is just terrible luck, and there is nothing you can do but try again. You will not lose immediately since you can make a mistake seven times. A chain reaction will continue until it reaches risky crates that might contain bombs. That's when you'll notice numbers around the crates. These numbers indicate how many crates nearby contain a bomb. Yo…

Don't play if you don't have good luck because there are a lot of scenarios that require you to straight up guess on a 50/50 chance and that just feels bad. It could be fun if they fixed or reduced the amount of 50/50 guessing there is but otherwise it's just frustrating. Additionally, the mini games are not fun and don't prove to be helpful usually. And then you get to the floor "Of Distrust" where it gives you only 7 and 8s for everything, how can you ever do that kind of floor? This game is awful

I feel bad as I got this on sale but I can't recommend it. I think it's a situation where the design ideas are interesting on paper and maybe even prototype, but in practice for its actual target audience, being people into logic puzzles and minesweeper, it swings too far into it feeling random for it to stay fun long. Between that and the odd and frustrating level design layouts it just feels like so many times you are just guessing and that's kind of you know, not great for logic puzzles. I DO think there's a version of this that works, but it needed a really finely tuned balancing pass and maybe for one reason or another that wasn't possible or too expensive. There is a "classic" mode but at the point... why not just play minesweeper for free? I think if you're a design nerd you might have fun playing this and trying to sus how it could work better, but i think if you want a fun spin on minesweeper you can do better, even on sale.

Good game. Completing it 100% is a hard challenge, relying heavily on luck, or speed, if you choose the alternative approach.

Score rush game but random generation levels have guessing bombs. Need to re-roll no guessing levels to get high score.