Hexagon Defense

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

Hexagon Defense is an Arcade-style game released on mobile devices in 2020 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2021. This game has players shooting at incoming enemies from a spinning hexagon at the center of the screen.

The presentation here is not very good. This feels very much like a mobile game, both due to the menu design as well as the game’s various themes, which range from bugs to cars to spaceships – all 2D images that act as little more than low-effort skins of the same gameplay. And as if to underline how little connection each of these themes has to the game, the music here seems like it consists purely of simple, repetitive themes chosen at random with no connection to the theme, and the sounds here are nonexistent – neither your weapon fire nor enemies make any noise whatsoever.

I mentioned the game’s menus a moment ago, and let’s revisit that, because it’s more than just the way they look that screams “mobile game”, since most of this game’s menus cannot be selected or navigated without using the touchscreen, which seems like a huge oversight. Yet despite this, gameplay can only be done with the gamepad here. It’s very odd, and makes this feel like an incomplete product.

As for the gameplay, this is decent, arcadey fare, with players shooting away at enemies from all angles using the left analog stick to aim. Players fire both in the direction they’re facing and the direction opposite, and every now and then can use a temporary special weapon that upgrades their attack. Enemies, meanwhile, come in a few different varieties and just keep randomly generating at faster rates until you can’t take any more. It all works, but it’s pretty repetitive.

Players can spend points they earn in-game to upgrade their attacks but, again, you can only get to this menu with the touchscreen, and also the trading of currency for upgrades is done in a way that only reminds the player how this was clearly a mobile game intended for use with microtransactions.

In the end, the core gameplay of Hexagon Defense is fine, but it’s also shallow and repetitive, and the sorts of problems this game has make it feel like it was a real quick and slipshod port from the mobile platform to Nintendo Switch. If you’re looking for an inexpensive Arcade-style game to kill a few minutes of your time, this will do the trick, but this is such a sloppy port of such a simple game that it even for its low asking price of $4 it feels like we deserve better.

tl;dr – Hexagon Defense is an Arcade-style game that has you shooting enemies to keep them from reaching a spinning hexagon in the center of the screen. It’s a decent distraction, but it gets repetitive really quickly, and this release has multiple issues that mark it as an extremely sloppy, lazy port. For most players, this game probably isn’t worth even its low asking price.

Grade: C-

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