Sudoku Challenge!

Genre: Sudoku Puzzle

Players: 1

.

Review:

Sudoku Challenge! is a Sudoku Puzzle game released on the Nintendo DSi via the DSiWare service in 2009 and then grandfathered into the Nintendo 3DS eShop when that system was released. This game, which is played with your Nintendo DSi/Nintendo 3DS in “book mode” turned sideways, apparently boasts that it has “more than 100,000,000 sudoku puzzles”, which leads me to believe that this game’s puzzles are procedurally-generated. And in addition to standard Sudoku Puzzles, this release also offers its own variant, “Grand Sudoku”, which has players solving five Sudoku Puzzles mashed together into one.

The presentation here makes use of simple, clean visuals that work well for Sudoku, but with the game backed ab a dreary, repetitive, incredible aggravating background theme that can’t be changed, and which will have you quickly reaching to mute the volume.

For those who have yet to try their hand at Sudoku, the simple premise is that players are provided a grid divided into 3×3 fields, with each field further divided into 3×3 squares. The grid already has some numbers filled in, and players must fill in the rest of the grid while following these simple rules: each row and column must include the numbers 1-9 with none repeating, and each 3×3 field must also contain the numbers 1-9 with none repeating. Players solve this puzzle largely using a process of elimination – once you know what numbers can’t be in a square, you can narrow it down to what must be there.

When it comes to the gameplay, Sudoku Challenge! avoids some of the common problems you find in Sudoku videogames. This game supports full note-taking, and it gives you options to decide how much “hint” help you want. However, a few other problems rear their head here that, taken together, make this experience almost intolerable.

First, this game lacks any sort of tutorial to assist those just starting off in the world of Sudoku trying to learn.

Secondly, much as the Brain Age version of Sudoku does, this release lets you use the touchscreen to write in numbers and have the game process these via character recognition to determine which number you wrote. The recognition here is far from perfect, but it is at least decent.

However, the inaccuracies with detection are greatly exacerbated by the way these misread numbers can overwrite your other numbers, with no undo button. As a result, you’ll be making one note, the game will decide it’s too big to be a note, and so it will fill the entire cel with a number that wipes out all the notes you took in that cel. This is so aggravating, that after it happened at least a half dozen times or so, I stopped playing this game, not having solved even one Sudoku puzzle.

That’s right, I’m reviewing this game without having even completed one puzzle within it. This game makes the process of solving Sudoku puzzles so torturous I refused to subject myself to it any further.

If you’re looking for a Sudoku game on your Nintendo 3DS, I implore you not to get Sudoku Challenge!. This game’s flaws make for horrible, frustrating gameplay, and you have so many other alternatives on the Nintendo 3DS that there is no good reason to suffer through this one.

tl;dr – Sudoku Challenge! is a version of the standard Sudoku Puzzle that has procedurally-generated puzzles and a “Grand Sudoku”-style puzzle that mashes together multiple puzzles into one. Unfortunately, this game’s faulty character recognition and lack of an undo button makes for gameplay that is torturously frustrating, and there’s just no reason to suffer through it with so many better alternatives on the Nintendo 3DS. Do not buy this game.

Grade: D

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Ben, Andy Miller, Exlene, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Talissa, Eli Goodman, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Ilya Zverev, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}