Thanks to Flynn’s Arcade for the review code

Title: Hexagravity
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $1.99
Release Date: 05/02/2019

Presentation

Hexagravity isn’t really a looker or really that impressive in general, going for a barebones presentation where the game takes place in a 2.5D perspective, rotating around the tower as you make your way up. The different characters do lead to a changing background as the difficulty goes higher, but it doesn’t really offer much worth nothing, and even the music fails to impress.

Gameplay

Hexagravity is a simple score chaser where the main goal is to scale a rotating tower as high as you possibly can, with the square only having the abilities to move, dash or jump at your disposal. This is a very barebones game with a local high score for each of the difficulties, so the whole aspect of the scorechasing is very important, and if it isn’t done right, then it’s not going to be that engaging.

Unfortunately, while the game actually does a decent job of being a score chaser in concept, the execution is not that great thanks to a really stupid control decision where you can’t use the D-buttons to control the square. This is just absolutely stupid for a game that pushes pixel-perfect platforming, and while Hexagravity isn’t unplayable without this option, it also comes off as a very silly handicap due to how smooth the experience would be with that support. You see, since dashing zips you to either side, combining it with precise jumps to scale the tower before you get left behind is significantly more difficult with the stick than it would be with a D-Pad or Buttons. This is easily a dealbreaker for me personally and honestly it led to me not wanting to stick around with this game for long after unlocking a character and giving some more score chasing a try.

That being said, there are a couple of game modes to unlock here, leaving some semblance of replay value to toy with. You have the basic difficulty that eases you into the game, a faster difficulty that picks up the pace, followed by more difficulty options including some character skins that blatantly ripoff characters from other “super hard” games such as Super Meat Boy, Super Hexagon, and Flappy Bird. Unfortunately, unlocking anything past the harder difficulty proved too boring for me, since while I did make decent progress in that mode, the awkward stick controls and lack of variety made me give up long before I ever reached the point threshold to unlock the higher difficulties, producing a similar problem that Knight Terrors did for me.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Hexagravity is a very boring and somewhat generic score chaser. Making it up as high as you can while the screen scrolls up should be an enjoyable challenge for the super cheap $2 pricetag, but the absolute exclusion of precise D-Button controls really hurt this game in the long run, and combine that with an uninteresting game flow and unlock system and you have a real bore that pales compared to better scorechasers for the same price. Maybe if this gets a patch to add D-Pad support it could be worth picking up on a sale, but the fact it lacks such an option to begin with and isn’t really doing much to engage or grip the player into giving things one more shot is a telling sign of Hexagravity’s quality.

I give Hexagravity a 3 out of 10.