Verdict

It’s easy to hate Super Hexagon on iOS because Super Hexagon really hates you too. Here’s how the average first fifteen minutes of play goes: You start the game and three seconds later you die, so you restart and this time you die within four seconds, you hit start again and last six, but next time you restart you last two. And on and on it goes.

In the first five minutes of play it makes you want to trash your phone, but after ten you’ll want to smash up your entire room. It really is that frustrating to play. Yet the game is absolute genius and you’ll keep coming back for more, because you’re a weak human and Super Hexagon is so much smarter than you.

It looks a bit like a cross between Asteroids and Tempest, but with one long geometric puzzle replacing the shooting. You control a triangular space ship that you spin around the hexagonal space towards the centre of the screen using simple left and right touch controls. The whole playing surface spins, alternating between a clockwise and anti-clockwise rotation at seemingly random times, while geometric shapes close in on you. There’s always a gap in these shapes and it’s your job to pilot your craft through it. While you’re doing this the screen flashes and pulsates to the rhythm of a techno, chip tune soundtrack that plays in the background.

Super Hexon only has three levels – hard, harder and hardest – but this doesn’t really mater as you’ll probably never really progress through them because the hard setting is ridiculously difficult anyway. Plus, the further into the game you go the more bizarre it becomes. For example, while initially you’re just trying to find gaps in the shapes, later they start to shift around you and then after that you’ll be faced with what initially look like impossible mazes to try to twitch your way through. There’s no let up, the shapes just keep coming and coming. One tiny slip up and you’re dead and have to start all over again. There are no extra lives on offer here. When you die, you’re dead, full stop. When you reach a new game elements, such as the switch into shapes, you think, ‘oh, what do I do here,’ and while you’re thinking that you die and have to start again.

Yes, it’s massively frustrating, but it’s also hugely addictive to play. You’ll find yourself hitting restart over and over just to try to score the small victory of lasting a couple of extra seconds. Suddenly an hour will have passed and you’ll have been totally unaware of it because Super Hexagon has taken over your mind. You have been warned.

Super Hexagon Verdict
Super Hexagon is so difficult it’ll make you weep tears of blood, but you won’t care because you’ll have been sucked into its evil universe and so just can’t help yourself from continually hitting retry.

Trusted Score