Mega Mosaic is a satisfying puzzle, played in a single huge grid, a highly recommended variation of the classic minesweeper with a quite different flavour.

Review written after having played 100% of the game, for 96h 30m. About one hour per 1%.

Gameplay:
It's just a small variation of Minesweeper. For those too young to not have tried it, it's a simple puzzle game. It's played on a grid covered with square tiles. You can click on a tile to uncover what's beneath, and if it's empty, all adjacent empty tiles are uncovered. If beneath the tile there's a mine, you lose. Only one life. In some uncovered tiles there's a number, which indicates the number adjacent mines. You can mark tiles as mines. Game ends when all mines are marked as such.

Mega Mosaic changes a few aspects of the classic rules but in fact it's just a small variation. First of all, the grid is huge: 250x250 tiles; that makes 62,500 tiles in total. Minesweeper is played usually in grids of 10x10 to 50x50, to give you an idea of the magnitudes in size change. All tiles are start uncovered; some contain numbers, some are empty. The numbers tell you how many white tiles are adjacent, including the tile in the center with the number. So each tile can give no clues (empty), or have a number between 0 and 9. So you have to mark the white tiles, but also mark the non-white tiles with blue colour. It's like marking the mines but also having to explicitly mark the tiles without mines.

Unlike Minesweeper, you can mismark tiles, so you can remove and change marking without losing the game. When there are too many errors accumulated, a button saying "clear errors" appears, and it will unmark any wrong marked tiles and the eight adjacent ones, even if they were right. So take a good look before hitting the button to rebuild what you know was right. When a tile is rightly marked and its eight adjacent ones too, the number of the tile changes, telling you all is right in that 3x3 tile part.

So actually explaining the rules is longer than running the game and trying it yourself. There are no instructions, but it's easy to learn how to play, the basic tricks, and how shapes and numbers can give you a clue of when and where to mark stuff. Two possible choices? Try one, if it's wrong keep playing until the clear errors button appears.

Another slight change from Minesweeper, and I think it was a great idea to implement, is that the board is divided in 50 zones. The zones are separated by already marked white tiles which you can't unmark. They're often very useful when starting or ending a zone. Each zone has a pixel-art picture when finished, and all zones have an achievement attached to them.

Mouse only, left click for white and right click for blue, click again to unmark, hold middle button to pan around the board, scroll middle button to zoom in/out. Simple accessible menu by icon or escape, quick exit with auto saving incorporated. Very comfortable and streamlined gameplay, and easy to get "into the zone". It also has the ability to replay the order in which you solved each tile when you finish the game, which makes a nice animation you can see any time. Until you restart the game, that is.

All this might sound to some as dull and repetitive. Well these mosaic games aren't for everyone. But I never felt it was repetitive. I felt engaged and eager to complete more and advance to the next zone. And it also had, for me, that "a few more tiles more" thing.

A highlight I'd like to say is that 52% of gamers who started Mega Mosaic have finished 100% of it. I don't see many 100-hour games with that high completion rate that often. I guess it means something, very clearly.

While, I repeat, it's a slight variation of Minesweeper, I think it's at the same time a great refinement of the original, giving it a distinct flavour and gameplay that I found much better than the classic. You could hold to "technically a variation of Minesweeper", but many will feel it's a different game in the same class of tile puzzles.


The good:

• Refined, expanded variation of Minesweeper with easy and more fun (IMHO) gameplay.
  
• High quality pixel-art which gladly surprised me at the beginning, and continued to please me every time I completed a zone.
  
• Very lightweight, would probably run on hamster-powered ancient devices without problem.
  
• About 100 hours of gameplay for an excellent price, even when not in sale. It's also part of some great puzzle bundles. (Yes the game page says "over 10 hours" but it's a typo, even if you're fast at it, it's 85-90 hours minimum, I'd say.)

The bad:

• Nothing. Really. I think the game is perfect at it is; other's might not agree, but yes it doesn't need anything else, and nothing has to be changed or removed. There was a saying about beauty with those words. Then I say, this game is beautiful.

Conclusion: Highly recommended. Puzzle lovers, don't wait, get it, you'll not regret it. Unless you hate Minesweeper and similar.

我是笨蛋，真的要长脑子了，提前预防老年痴呆

有趣的巨型扫雷，玩起来就不想停手。
可以不用猜，全靠推理确定是否正确，好评！