MAZAICA

Mazaica starts out pretty interesting, but it just sadly isn't much of a logical puzzle game and very quickly becomes trial & error. The goal is to paint a field of tiles with different colors based on how many fields every color can paint. For smaller levels, that works just fine and the game is fun for the first few hours, but the bigger levels (coupled with the higher difficulties) give you barely anything to work with. You can scratch off a few colors here and there, but then you have a color that is supposed to take up 50 fields right next to some that take up 23 and 35, with not much of a hint on where what color goes. Later mechanics, like addition, make that even more frustrating. Sometimes you can kind of intuit where which color needs to snake itself based on the patterns, but in other levels, you just end up being lost. I think the main problem is that all the levels are randomly generated - that is, where the color fields are and how they are distributed / how many hints are placed onto the levels depends on the difficulty and is randomized; only the actual level patterns are preset. I much rather would have preferred handcrafted, handtested levels where it is guaranteed that there is a logical solution you can follow, because that is definitely not the case as it stands for a lot of the bigger levels. Luckily, the game does have built in hint functions that mark tiles for you or even solve an entire color, but the bigger the levels became, the more I found myself relying on those almost exclusively instead of bashing my head against the wall. If you don't want to use them and still solve all levels on all difficulties, you will have to guess, no two ways about it, and that just isn't fun when you realize that something doesn't work 15 minutes into a level and the only way to untangle the mess is to restart. Maybe the mentioned random level generator that distributes the colors into the pregenerated field patterns is broken, but either way - Mazaica quickly becomes an exercise in frustration and guesswork, which just doesn't mesh with what is supposed to be a logical puzzle game where you unravel the solution color by color. I can't recommend it at all, and that is upsetting because I played some Hamster On Coke games before, and they did have handcrafted puzzles that always remain logical.