Game Chest: Logic

The concept of value is a strange thing, unrelated to logic or empirical forms of measurement.

It’s easy to appreciate if it’s applied to a single item – there’s only one Mona Lisa, for instance – but when it’s the difference between two fairly similar games, then things become harder to quantify.

Last week’s Game Chest: Solitaire was let down by its lack of value, yet while Game Chest: Logic may contain the same number of games inside its virtual mechanical innards as its predecessor, the value of the individual titles is far greater.

This being the Logic collection, there’s a distinct lack of luck-based card games here. Instead we have Windows stalwart Minesweeper placed alongside everyone’s favourite newspaper puzzler Sudoku and grandfather of western gaming, Chess.

As the norm is to flog off Sudoku and Chess as separate titles, the fact they’re both here together dulls the pain of handing over £2.49 somewhat, with Minesweeper a nice, if not great, bonus.

The structure is the same as the previous Game Chest title, meaning that there’s a compulsive combination of RPG-like levelling and in-depth stat-tracking that encourages you to keep coming back to each title in order to win pins and Xbox Live achievements.

The presentation, too, is great for these types of games, with a very nicely crafted board for Chess sitting alongside the excellently designed menus.

There are distinct differences in playing quality between the three titles on offer, however, due to the interface having to be reworked to cater for the different games.

The worst is easily Minesweeper, which tends to scroll the board every time you want to place a flag down, making every layout past Easy difficulty extremely fiddly, while Chess comes out on top due to its simple highlighted move grids.

Each game offers up three different difficulty levels ranging from Easy to Hard, but this isn’t quite enough for Sudoku and especially Chess.

Going from suicidal Easy AI that carelessly chucks its queen around to the far more tricky Normal is quite a leap, and will no doubt leave beginners struggling to find their ideal opponent.

There is the option of going toe-to-toe against human opposition over Live, but this requires you to know their email address and doesn’t include matchmaking.

Nevertheless, the three games on offer here offer a fair bit more value than the previous Game Chest purely due to the core designs.

Unlike that other collection, though, the individual parts feel a little stripped down to fit inside the pack, making them less-than the ideal versions of said games despite the visual panache that surrounds them.