Review: Zombie Minesweeper

This is going to be great!
So many levels they don't even
fit on the screen!

Zombie minesweeper is a puzzle game that was recently featured on the Google Play Store. I say it’s a puzzle game mostly because it’s based on the Windows puzzle game, Minesweeper. It’s really an action game on top of some vague semblance of Minesweeper. In Zombie Minesweeper your job is to guide a girl through a mine field. There is a fog of war which reaches either the next number or two tiles ahead, whichever comes first. You can always see previously explored areas currently present on the screen. The goal of the game is a little different. You simply need to get to the end of the map. Optionally you can do this while flagging as many mines as possible and killing as many zombies as possible, preferably without dying.

The game maintains a healthy set of fundamental problems. I’m going to criticise it a fair bit, but in all fairness updating Minesweeper is a difficult nut to crack. The logic is limited and the game is inherently unfair. I do like the concept though and I’ve tried to mention how the design could have been improved. I've also mentioned how other people have improved Minesweeper, which could have been taken on board while designing this.

Just beat a level that's impossible
 to lose LIKE A BOSS
#YOLO

Zombie Minesweeper maintains the quirky sense of humour you would expect from an obscure web comic. The story does help give the game some structure which allows them to add new zombie types as you progress. As you would expect this is more of a marketing decision than an idea which really adds value to the game. A customisable map size, difficulty level setting and a high score probably would have kept me playing longer. They might as well have done - they never bother to finish the story (to be continued). Y’know, because oh boy, Minesweeper 2!

If you hadn’t already noticed marketing seems to have had a fair influence on the game. The game has an unhealthy obsession with twitter. It wants you to tweet after completing each level. I can’t imagine anyone would actually do this, but if you do decide to tweet this stuff, count me among the large number of people that won’t follow you.

There are three medals available on each level: Tries (how many times you died), Hits vs. Misses (the number of mines you correctly flagged) and Zombie Kills (self explanatory). Here’s a run down on each:

Medals

Tries

Urgh.
Yes, stepping on that mine is
the only way to progress.

An odd choice for the game is that you can’t actually lose at Zombie Minesweeper. When you die you are simply sent back to the start, everything explored thus far is retained. You can personally jump on every mine and feed yourself to zombies countless times. All it means is you won’t get a medal for “Tries”. I can see why they’ve done this; minesweeper can have an unfair random element that you’d want to remove. Unfortunately it has the knock on effect that completing the game isn’t the challenge. The challenge is trying to get gold medals. They might have been better off trying to keep it a little unfair and speed the game up. As it is it’s still unfair, just in a different way.

Tries can be irritating to get gold for as there are occasional aspects of the game which just aren’t quite polished enough. For example zombies can pop out of the floor directly under you and kill you unavoidably (unless you have shotgun ammo, which is unusual). Zombies can also spawn in corridors, which you can’t escape from unless you’re lucky enough to have ammo and mines can be placed on the only square you can walk on to progress in the level.

In later levels there are more corridors, also it can become challenging to make it past all of the monsters without dying - at least there were several levels that I didn’t manage first time while just trying to get to the exit as fast as possible and I’m not playing it twice. If it weren’t for all the issues discussed in the previous paragraph, this action challenge would have been Zombie Minesweeper’s saving grace.

Hits vs. Misses

Hits is surprisingly irritating to complete, as you need to scope the whole field and stand still while you select the flag then the square you want to flag. This is mostly just poor controls though. A double tap on the square you want to flag would have worked much better.

Yes! Stood on every mine!
Gold!

This isn’t the only problem with the controls, if for example you want to move left, most of the left hand side you actually want to press can be occupied with the buttons to deploy your arsenal. If you don’t want to accidentally plant bombs everywhere you’re forced to slowly move square by square to the left. These buttons should have been placed at the top and bottom of the screen, leaving a more square playing field. This problem was exacerbated by the thinner width of my screen and Zombie Minesweeper not compensating for it.

Hits is also scored in an odd way. Standing on a mine obviously kills you, but it also counts as a correctly flagged mine.

It’s clear that the objectives for this medal are supposed to clash with the tries medal, making it difficult to do both in one run, which isn’t a bad idea. Not that it matters, only the best medals in all your attempts count, so just do the level twice.

Removing the “Hits” medal, or replacing it with a “Number of Mines You Didn’t Walk on” medal would have better suited Minesweeper fans (presumably their target audience). The game is fairly slow compared to Minesweeper and this change would have sped things up.

It’s also worth noting that people that play Minesweeper a lot don’t tend to bother flagging some mines because in some cases it’s faster not to. So people that play Minesweeper are used to not bothering and it’s perfectly possible to do. Flagging is often done in Minesweeper because, there can be major speed advantage to flagging. Flagging the mines in Zombie Minesweeper slows the game down, which is obviously not good for an action game.

Zombie Kills

I’m not sure what you’ve done if you get less than a gold for zombie kills in the later levels. They walk into the mines themselves.

The main difficulty in killing zombies is most of the time you won’t have any ammo. Usually even when you do have some you have to run around trying to guide the zombies into mines and use your arsenal only if necessary, knowing you're going to need it. It's rather tedious and gives the game a very slow, boring pace.

Comparison to Minesweeper

Oh this takes me back.
It's not pleasant.

If you’ve not played much Minesweeper, you could be forgiven for thinking that Expert Minesweeper would be the most fun if you were good enough to do it. But it isn’t. Intermediate Minesweeper is the best Minesweeper. Playing on expert is always just incredibly frustrating. It almost always come down to a choice between two different places you could choose from with no way of telling which was correct. No amount of logic could dig you out, only clairvoyancy. Zombie minesweeper’s fields aren’t as prone to this problem as expert Minesweeper, and the balance of complexity is well chosen. It still has this issue though.

Before moving permanently to Linux, or smart phones were even a thing, I played a fair few freeware Minesweeper variants. I had one which would check if there was somewhere on the grid you could have derived either had or did not have a mine. If there wasn’t anywhere it was like a free click - the mines could not hurt you. This is something that could have been implemented in Zombie Minesweeper.

They might have thought of some of these ideas and tested them. Unfortunately I can’t find out if that’s likely via the number of beta testers because the “Credits” button is broken.

All in all Zombie Minesweeper, doesn’t really add much in the way of a puzzle element. There are Minesweeper variants played on of grids made from all kinds of regular tessellating shapes. These are more interesting puzzles which allow for faster game play (if you want) than Zombie Minesweeper. There are also better action games available, like Super Hexagon. So in summary: stick to Minesweeper, its variants or Super Hexagon.

Addendum:
They have fixed the problem with screen sizes in a update.