Jigsaw Masterpieces

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

.

Review:

WARNING: THIS GAME HEAVILY PUSHES MICROTRANSACTIONS

Jigsaw Masterpieces is a Jigsaw Puzzle game released on PC in 2019 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2020, containing 3 puzzles and enticing players to buy more via paid DLC.

Let me just go back a second. This game, selling for $1, only comes with 3 puzzles. The rest you need to pay for, buying them in expansions that cost $3 for 10 puzzles each, meaning each puzzle in this game costs roughly $0.30. Contrast that with, say, Puzzle Galaxy, which is free and comes with 25 puzzles, with expansion packs under $5 containing as from 22 to 54 additional puzzles each. If you’re doing the math with me here, Jigsaw Masterpieces is definitely starting to seem like a raw deal.

At the very least the art on offer here is varied and generally nice, though unfortunately the handful of musical themes you’re given to choose from are all terrible and repetitive, leaving just a few “nature sounds” background noise tracks as an alternative. Beyond the images themselves, players have multiple backgrounds to cycle between, which is nice.

Players can opt to use either traditional gamepad controls (moving a cursor) or touchscreen controls, which is nice, but you’ll almost certainly want to stick with playing in docked mode if you’re playing with any decent-sized number of puzzle pieces, as the game appears to have no zoom function whatsoever, and trying to make out the details of the tiny pieces on the Nintendo Switch’s screen is a nightmare.

In the end, Jigsaw Masterpieces just fails at pretty much everything when it comes to Jigsaw Puzzle games. There’s no zoom function, the music is terrible, and the amount of content you get for what you spend is woefully overpriced. You have multiple better options for Jigsaw Puzzle games on Nintendo Switch, go for one of those instead.

tl;dr – Jigsaw Masterpieces is a Jigsaw Puzzle game that only comes with three puzzles, pushing players to spend more to get more puzzles, at a rate that’s far worse than competing titles, all in a game with terrible music and a lack of a zoom function. Don’t bother with this rip-off of a Jigsaw Puzzle game, there are plenty of better options for you in this genre on Nintendo Switch.

Grade: F

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