Customer Reviews

Sudoku Mania

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(25)

 

 

We have tested quite a number of Sudoku handheld games, both for the DS and PSP. My boyfriend is a Sudoku addict! I honestly have to say that Sudoku Mania is the *worst* of anything we have tried.

You can chose a few options - the difficulty of the puzzle, the number of items per grid (2x2, 3x3) and solving with numbers or symbols. You also choose the theme of your puzzle, which change the look and feel of the game. Then you launch into the automatically generated puzzle.

The layout they chose to use is simply awful. The top display shows the puzzle. The bottom area has four TINY arrows that you can click on to move your "selection cube" up, down, left or right. You have to click precisely to move your cursor around. So you're watching the top screen and clicking in tiny spots on the bottom screen to position your cursor to the cube you want to work on. Yes, you can use the D-Pad as well.

Once you select a spot, you use the stylus to tap ONE NUMBER to put into that cube. You can't put in several numbers to indicate what you are currently working on!! Did the developers even play Sudoku before developing this game? No other game misses this most basic technique of playing Sudoku.

Oh, if you put an incorrect number in - where the number is already in a row or column - it flashes. So much for using your brain to solve the puzzle. Not that you really can solve some of these puzzles - their autogenerator seems to have faults and not all games are intuitively solvable.

All of these issues would already have put this game at the bottom of the list, but even their font choices are poor! Looking at the grid, some of the numbers look like other numbers. The contrast is poor so it's hard to see any of them. Again, these are basic issues that really should have been fixed. It's rather obvious that these guys were out to capitalize on the Sukoku mania and figured that once someone bought the game because it said "Sudoku", they'd be unable to return it.

With all the other Sudoku games out on the market, there's really no reason to get this one.

Rating: 1/5

I bought this game after playing the sudoku in Brain Age and I am very disappointed
with Sudoku Mania. The overall quality of the implementation is really shoddy,
especially when compared to Brain Age. Just to point out a few of the major
limitations:

The user interface is really primitive. You can't use the stylus to navigate.
No handwriting recognition (a nice feature of Brain Age).

The font they use for the numbers is very hard to read (e.g. 3's and 8's are
almost indistinguishable).

There's no way to take notes about the potential possible numbers that
are valid in a given square (this is one of the great features of the
Brain Age sudoku).

It appears that they generate puzzles that have multiple solutions, which,
according to my understanding of sudoku, is not copacetic. What's the point
if you have to guess?

Trust me, buy Brain Age, not this turkey!

This is an awful game! I bought it because I've finished all the Sudoku puzzles that came with Brain Age. I'll have to go play them again, because I just wasted $9.99 on this junk.

The worst part is that there's no way to enter possible solutions. You can have either a blank square or a number, that's it.

I also only played for a short while and was too frustrated to continue, but the puzzles on the difficult level do not appear solvable - and I'm a pretty good player.

I have a version for my PDA that lets you choose colors instead of numbers and I love that feature, so I thought I'd like the different themes on this game, but they're just really annoying.

I also think the touch screen programming is off. When you click on an item, sometimes it works and sometimes it acts as though you touched something else. I haven't noticed this on my other DS games, so I assume it's shoddy programming.

This game is TERRIBLE!

I bought hoping that the random puzzle generation would keep it interesting; unfortunately the generator, much like the rest of the program, is a disaster. For brevity's sake, rather than list out every single defect I'll just focus on the two most significant issues:

1) There's no form of annotation -- no way to mark for yourself which numbers have been eliminated as possibilities. So be prepared to drag along some paper with you.

2) The generator produces malformed puzzles. The whole point of sudoku is that there should be ONE solution to the puzzle, and your goal is to reason it out. The designers evidently thought differently, since the puzzle generator often creates puzzles with multiple acceptable solutions. So actually reasoning out a solution is often impossible, and you end up needing to make some random choices.

The biggest limitation of this game: You HAVE to navigate the grid using the D pad, and not with the stylus. If you have played Sudoku, you know you're jumping all over the screen. Imagine having to click-click-click all the way to a open space. This feels like a quick port from another platform, rather than a DS game.

Don't waste your money on this one.

If you're thinking of buying this game, STOP NOW! I didn't look at any reviews until I bought, got it, played it for about 3 minutes and realized that it is, in fact, the worst game ever made. I, like a few others, bought this game because I had solved all the puzzles on Brain Age. It was nothing like Brain Age. My bad. I want my money back. Amazon should not even sell this game anymore and offer a partial refund to all that have been duped into buying it on here.

As noted in other reviews, this game is very poorly designed. You can't enter "temporary" numbers as you're considering different answers. You have to write them down (!) or go back over the game constantly to remember which numbers might go where. This means it takes much longer than it should to solve a puzzle. The numbers are very difficult to read (glad it wasn't just me who had trouble reading them). Also very annoying is the countdown clock and the animated ugly graphic (blinking its eye) on the touchscreen pad. You should be able to turn these off. They are not helpful. I'm putting this game in my Goodwill bag. Please, someone come out with a DS Sudoku game that is designed like the Brain Age game!

One star was too much. I just bought this game for $9 at Best Buy and that was about $10 too much. I played it for all of 5 minutes and will never put it back into my DS except as a prank to inflict on others.

If you've played Brain Age, do not think about playing this game. The touch-screen is barely used and there's nothing one can do with the touch screen that isn't faster to do with the cross pad and A button--actually, if holding the stylus, it's impossible to use the required A button.

I love sudoku, but the one that is part of the brain age is so pratical, so easy to play, with the space that u click, it zoom in and you write and it recognizes your writing, that I love it.
This game you have to push a button many times to go from the bottom to the top..
Please see how pratical is the one in brain age... when you have the new one I will buy it... so far, I dont use this game until I have finish with the brain age game.

As described in other reviews, the layout and usability of the game is HORRIBLE!! Not all puzzles have an unique answer either, which creates even more headache while playing the game. The fonts cause some numbers to look like others, which slows down game play. The designers took no advantage of the DS's touch screen ability. If you want a decent sudoku game, try Brain Age. It has over 100 Sudoku games, plus other brain training games and is listed for the same price on Amazon!!