Platinum Sudoku Review

Costas Stephanides’s Review

Gameloft do it again and again and again

About 6 months ago, we had the pleasure of going to Gameloft's office to get a glimpse of their upcoming games. Along with big titles like Lumines, The OC and Mission Impossible 3 was Platinum Sudoku. We fought back the groans and begrudingly agreed to review another Sudoku game - I'm sure my IQ must have improved after all these puzzle games.

Typically, Gameloft have created something that we haven't seen before. You would think that one Sudoku couldn't be that different from any other. That's not how Gameloft think. The grids, backgrounds and even the fonts can be customised to your taste. To be honest, once you've selected your favourite theme, it's unlikely you would ever go back. Some of the backgrounds can only be unlocked by completing the various difficulty levels so there's always an excuse to push yourself a bit harder.

Gameloft have also added a hints section. Depending on the difficulty, you start with a number of coins which can be used to buy hints. Hints include giving you clues for a certain square and also scanning the whole grid to find any mistakes. This whole hints idea is very neat and it's a shame they didn't make a bit more out of it. But as we've never seen anything like this before, we cannot criticise too much.

There's even more to help the beginner Sudoku-ers. In the early levels, the 'easiest' cell to solve is highlighted for you to give you an idea of where to start. Fill in the number and a new cell will be highlighted. Personally, I found this worked really well on the easier settings. Maybe I have a different approach to solving the puzzle to the Gameloft guys but some of the 'easy' cells made no sense further on in the game.

The game does have the now ubiquitous pencil/draft option but you can only use four numbers in each square. Controlling the game should be a standard approach for Sudoku. To some extent it is, but the cursor does have a certain flow to it as it moves around and the game generally gleams of Gameloft even for this aspect.

With over half a million grids (actually 640,000 but half a million sounds better) to play from you should never be bored. There is even a Sudoku X level where you have to think about the main diagonals as well as the horizontals and verticals. Each game does have its own ID number but I couldn't find a way to select a specific ID. There's got to be a grid which is just 1,2,3,4,5,etc and I'm bloody well going to find it.

Overall, Gameloft have done it again and brought Sudoku to the masses which should appeal to most Sudoku fans. Hardcore fans may want to take a look at Sudoku Deluxe which has provides you with some deep tactics.