Mind Maze review for PS Vita, PS4, Xbox One, Switch

Mind Maze will feel very familiar to anyone who ever had time to kill and nothing more than a pen and paper at their disposal. It?s basically just Dots and Boxes, with a few minor tweaks here and there to make it more complex.

I?m not going to pretend Mind Maze is anything incredible. It?s pretty basic, and even if it tweaks the game?s formula a little it doesn?t do anything really noteworthy. But, at the same time, I don?t want to discount that too much — the worst game I?ve played this year, after all, was another Vita version of Dots and Boxes that was absolutely terrible in every way imaginable. So there?s something to be said for being functional.

Further, because it?s so basic, it?s actually kind of addictive. The game on which it?s based has been around for more than a century, and Mind Maze?s developers were smart enough to not get in their own way by making things more complicated. The tweaks I mentioned above are only things like changing the shape of the board, or adding a mode where you can take on multiple AI opponents, neither of which change the goal of the game in any noticeable way.

Literally the only complaint I have is that the Vita version of the game doesn?t have touch controls, which means that you sometimes need to fiddle around with your cursor before you can place your line exactly where you want it. As complaints go, that?s nothing.

Again, I wouldn?t say that Mind Maze is some brilliant puzzle game, or even a crazy new take on a durable genre. It?s as basic as they come. But it works, and it?s addictive, and that?s really all it needs to be.

Sometimes You provided us with a Mind Maze PS Vita code for review purposes.