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F-Droid App Review: Antimine

2023-07-13 22:08:45Z (last updated 2023-08-02 13:31:22Z)

Recently I was browsing the games category on F-Droid, and I found a game

called Antimine.

Antimine

Of course, I downloaded it to try. And I got extremely hooked into it to the

point where I basically did not use my computer for most of the day.

In summary, Antimine is a Minesweeper game on Android that's also open source. I already know how to play Minesweeper, so this post will not be about that.

Source code for Antimine

I think Antimine is a great Minesweeper game, but I do have my little issues with it.

Good stuff:

Nice tile theme and stuff.
You can resume games (not sure if you can have multiple games that can be resumed).
Calming background music.
Even if you lose, you can continue playing anyways (except when you fail on the last mine).
Other things I'm taking for granted.

Nits:

Hints are only about 1 per successful game, which can make a 100x100 Minesweeper game much more difficult if you run out of hints (Hints are needed due required guessing).
Audio feedback is too slow, not instant. This gets annoying when I'm basically trying to speed run/stock up on hints, because most of the time is spent waiting for the audio feedback to occur.
If you press the number while having "Flag when tap on numbers" disabled and "Allow tap on numbers" enabled, the game doesn't care if you don't have enough flags in the radius of the number, it will tap all squares anyway, causing a game loss.
"Flag when tap on numbers" pretty much allows you to not use your brain to play Minesweeper, since the game technically plays the game for you. :P
The "No guessing" algorithm fails to make a game that doesn't require guessing.
There's a control scheme where you select what happens when you tap (flag or reveal). It sometimes gets out of sync of reality, showing it is in flag mode when it is actually in reveal mode. This caused me to further revealing tiles with mines, which is very annoying.
The default hidden tile theme makes it hard to distinguish each tile. (A theme that makes all tiles separate is there, but requires explicit configuration)
Lags a lot with a lot of tiles e.g. 100x100.
Zooming in/out will not be responsive to your gestures i.e. If you zoom out a bit, it will continue zooming out at a constant speed.

Even though there was so many nits, the game is so fun (or something else) to play that I spent a total of 7 hours, 6 minutes and 22 seconds today playing it and 4 hours and 22 seconds yesterday playing it. Basically, I spent my entire day playing the game (and also noticing a lot of little things).

Also, I finished a 100x100 Minesweeper game (A.K.A. "Legend" difficulty) which took about 3 hours. I did have to continue after some failed mines, so the play was not a perfect one. Now that I have 100 hints (yeah I grinded that), I should be able to do a perfect 100x100 Minesweeper game.

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