Infinity Sweeper proves that the Balatro model doesn’t work for every game
With Balatro, developer LocalThunk took a game of poker and said, “let’s make it roguelike, and let’s make it chaotic.” It worked: Balatro has sold millions of copies, and since then, other developers have tried to recreate its joyous replayability with varying levels of success. Beyond Words did it with Scrabble, Dice of Kalma did it with dice, and Raccoin did it with coin pusher machines. Enter Infinity Sweeper, developed by Longshot Studio and published by Yogscast Games. It’s a title which attempts to turn the classic Minesweeper into a roguelike.
Except… it doesn’t quite manage to capture exactly what makes Balatro and the rest work so well. Infinity Sweeper takes the simple game of Minesweeper and adds various modifier tiles, playable cards and permanent effects, all with the idea of making the game more random and interesting. There’s a couple of problems with this: first, Infinity Sweeper does a very bad job of explaining to you what any of the cards or modifiers do, and second, the game of Minesweeper essentially never changes.
I’ve found that, ultimately, it doesn’t matter if I don’t know what any of the cards or tile effects do in Infinity Sweeper, because I can completely ignore them and just play it as a standard game of Minesweeper. That’s not something you can do in Balatro: as each round increases, so does your target number, so if you don’t have adequate score multipliers and modifiers, you’re going to fail. Not here. As long as you’re good at Minesweeper, nothing else matters.
Infinity Sweeper does try to mix things up by giving you “boss” levels, where you’re racing against the clock, and giving you a number of lives, which mean you can hit a couple of mines before you get a game over. But they never change the core experience. Sure, the roguelike nature means you can keep playing and see what high score you get, but it’s not exciting enough to keep you coming back. The games of Minesweeper you’re presented with are never massive or unorthodox in any way, so all feel like straightforward, easy levels of the age-old Windows classic.
It’s a shame: I was looking forward to a twist on the Minesweeper formula, but Infinity Sweeper fails to deliver on its promise to truly transform the game into something new. If you’re desperate for a new Minesweeper game, it’ll keep you entertained for a while – and with its RRP of just £7.99/$9.99, it’s hard to complain too much. But when the roguelike nature doesn’t really add anything evolutionary, there are plenty of other Minesweeper games to choose from.
Infinity Sweeper is available now on PC.
