LittleBigPlanet 2 was envisioned as being a platform for games, and with that has come countless homages to classic games. It isn’t often that you’ll see one for something recent though — with Sack Flower being about as recent as things get in that regard. Super Hexagon has received a lot of critical acclaim, made a number of top game of the year lists, and has succeeded on both PC and mobile devices at delivering an addictive experience. Now, an homage to it in the form of Hyper Hexagon has hit LBP 2 and manages to bring with it a lot of what made the original so good. It’s got an addictive thumping soundtrack and easily the most iconic audio in SH — GAME OVER>BEGIN>GAME OVER>BEGIN — which you’ll hear many times in both the original game and this recreation.
What’s great about it is that while it can be called a rip-off, it’s clearly crafted by someone who really dug the original creation and this works as not only a way to sell people on the original game being great, but also acts as a proof of concept for playing the game with a controller. Not having a smartphone or tablet capable of playing it (damn you, Amazon marketplace!), but having the Steam version to compare it to, it’s much easier to control using the L1 and R1 buttons than using the mouse. In theory, stick support would be best, but it could also get far more confusing that way given how things twist and turn. By limiting the controls to left and right, you always know where you need to go in relation to where you are — it’ll just take a few deaths to get used to them.
A lot of the fan-made homages in the LBP games either do such a poor job of it that you can’t help but laugh, or do an okay job, but leave you wanting to play the original game because it’s executed far better. Hyper Hexagon, however, is reminiscent of Sack Flower in that it manages to pay homage to something else while not coming off as a way to pay a crappy version for free, but instead takes a concept and does it so well that it makes you not only want to play the LBP 2 version, but the real deal as well. Given that the game only costs a dollar for a mobile device, and a few bucks on Steam, it’s worth buying the authentic product, but partaking in this one as a supplemental version to keep your skills sharp, or to just try the game out with a new control scheme is entirely worth it. All you have to do to find it is search “Hyper Hexagon” in the in-game text-search area and it will be the only result there, or just search “Hexagon” and it’ll be about five down.
