Hegzis – PS5 Review

Hegzis is a puzzle game from Turkish developers Clazz Apps who seem to have more of an avionics background than one making games but here they are with a six-sided spin on Tetris.

The core gameplay here is pretty straightforward.  You have to place shapes on a board and if they form a complete end-to-end line, in any direction, every piece in that line.  So far, so Tetris.  There are two core differences though.  Firstly, instead of square based tetrominos, your shapes (and indeed the boards themselves) are based on hexagons.  That means instead of Tetris‘ lines, cubes, l-shapes and t-shapes, everything here is more diagonally-constructed if that makes sense.  If you’ve ever seen the classic ’80s UK TV quiz show Blockbusters you’ll get this right away but if you haven’t, it doesn’t take long at all to get acclimatised to the game’s mechanics.

The shape you have to use is randomly selected by the game and then you’ve got to place it wherever you want on the board, as long as no other pieces block it.  There’s no gravity element in play either.  You can spin the pieces, of course.  And then it’s just about completing the level objective which can either be to hit a score target, clear a number of lines or place a set total of pieces.   And, on the face of it, that’s it.

The game doesn’t really do a very good job of explaining its other mechanics though.  For example, there are power-ups that allow you to delete existing pieces, place single hexes or undo your last move but we didn’t even look at that until an hour or two into the game because the difficulty curve is so light.  When we did want to use them, we had to figure that bit out ourselves (just press R1 to get to the bit of the screen where you activate them).  Also, it took us far too long to realise that you have a second choice of piece to play and you get to that with the right analog stick.  Hmmm.  Also, we’re earning gold coins all this time.  Is there a way to spend them?  Apparently not.

In terms of the mechanics of the game, that’s pretty much it.  There’s not much to Hegzis and yet, somehow, the game has several factors that really annoyed us.  The main one being the way you rotate pieces.  Being hex-based, the pieces can rotate into six positions but the game only lets you rotate one way and the responsiveness and speed of the rotation is really slow, at least in relation to how quick it should be.  This should be instant.  Sure, there’s no gravity to make you rush your moves but it’s just so clunky when you’ve got to rotate your piece five times and there’s an arbitrary delay on each turn.  This stuff should be zippy and crisp.

And then there are the levels themselves.   The game has well over 100 levels set across five areas – named things like ‘Serene Beech’, ‘ Whispering Forest’ and ‘Lovely City.’  That’s fine except that there’s basically nothing in the game to suggest you’re in any of those areas.  The stage selection screens barely hint at you being in a specific location and the in-game screens don’t have any backdrop visuals at all.  And the only difference between these stages is that each new one makes the board shape slightly larger than the last and introduces a new gameplay piece (with each one getting more annoying to use).   So, essentially every level here is basically the same.  Sure, they get harder but that’s mitigated by the fact that failure doesn’t really matter.  If you run out of space to play any more pieces, the game lets you restart from where you die with a couple of smaller pieces to play that will definitely get you out of trouble.  You’ll also have a stock of bombs or whatever anyway as you rarely have to use these.

That’s the thing with this game.  Look, it works.  There’s no bugs and it does what it sets out to do but it’s just so repetitive.  If the gameplay was snappier, more fun then sure, that might not be a problem.  But playing this many levels that all feel the same is just too boring for us.  We like puzzle games, we like games that take on Tetris but put their own twist on it (shout out to the GOAT of the genre, Chime).  But Hegzis feels like it was created to just work and at no point did anyone think to make it fun.  It’s not clever or challenging enough to be interesting, it’s not compelling enough to be addictive and there’s no sense of anticipation when you unlock a new set of levels because you know they’ll be just like the previous forty.  And instead we just felt like Hegzis was challenging our endurance, not our brainpower.