Asteroids Minesweeper Review

There’s nothing quite as satisfying as clearing a Minesweeper mine field: after minutes of concentration and careful consideration the relief of making it through is almost indescribable. The random placement of bombs means that no two games are the same, and you could play Minesweeper ad infinitum. However, if you’re looking for something a little more challenging, look no further than Asteroids Minesweeper, a 3D variety from developer Francois Braud.

The premise is exactly as you’d expect: scattered throughout a field of cubes are some mines, and empty cubes display how many mines are in it’s surrounding cubes. There are 26 cubes now however, instead of the 2D variety’s eight, which is a significant ramp up in difficulty. To help, the cubes are now colour-coded depending on how many mines are nearby, and instead of flagging mines you can now disarm them. This causes the empty cubes that you have uncovered to dynamically change allowing you to single out those cubes that contain mines.

Another distinction from Minesweeper is the attempts system: you have some leeway in trying to diffuse the asteroids similarly to a lives system. You lose an attempt if you click a bomb or incorrectly identify an empty cube as one that has a bomb, and you have seven of them to start with. This allows me to say with some certainty that the explosion effect is quite loud!

This is a rather hollow asteroid

There are several pre built levels in the game, and some modifiers to change up the tried-and-tested gameplay. Some levels have bombs that, after five moves, will change places to any unrevealed cubes. These levels sound difficult, but they really presented no additional difficulty because I found that I could clear through the majority of the level and confine the mines to a safe, predictable group of cubes. Other levels had indicators of how many mines were in each column, which was helpful for the hollow cube and sphere levels. The final modifier spawns differently coloured outlines around random cubes, with the same colour outlines indicating that those cubes contain the same thing - either nothing or a mine!

When first started up, Asteroids Minesweeper didn’t really look much like an asteroid but rather a series of clean, white boxes. A quick jump into the options menu allowed me to enable the space graphics however, and finally I was breaking down asteroids. The options menu past that very much disappointed me: there is no options to change resolution, full screen and no sound sliders make this a very lackluster PC port of what seems to be a mobile-optimised title.

There is a very small amount of story that only appears right at the end of the game, though is hinted at throughout. It feels like a kind of ARG built into the game, though the whole thing is so short that there isn’t enough to really pontificate on more. Outside of the main levels, you can generate custom levels though they are reasonably limited, with only a few options for each setting.

All this game is missing is Aerosmith's I Don't Want To Miss A Thing 

Asteroids Minesweeper is a very simple game that honestly feels more like a proof of concept. What is there is fun, but there’s not a huge amount if you’re looking for hand-crafted puzzles. The addition of modifiers adds a lot to the game but they really only serve to make it all easier, which isn’t necessarily what you’d want. The soundtrack is great, a fantastic calming affair that lets you keep your head once the mistakes start occurring.