iLounge

Company: Houdah Software

Website: www.Houdah.com

Title: ACTSudoku

Players: One

Price: $3

Compatible: iPod touch, iPhone, iPhone 3G

Houdah Software ACTSudoku

By Jeremy Horwitz

Editor-in-Chief, iLounge
Published: Friday, August 1, 2008
Category: Games - iPad, iPhone + iPod

On August 1, 2008, iLounge published iPhone Gems: Every Sudoku Game, Reviewed, a feature article looking at 23 different Sudoku releases for the iPhone OS. This review focuses on ACTSudoku ($3) by Houdah Software; you can read the full article, with screenshots of all of the games together, through the link above. A collective screenshot below shows you some of the other Sudoku interfaces you can expect to find in these titles.

If you’re reading this article, you probably already know that Sudoku is a one-screen puzzle game based upon a 9-by-9 grid that’s partially filled with numbers. The objective is to fill the empty spaces of the grid with single digit numbers so that the same digit does not appear twice on any horizontal or vertical line. Additionally, the same number should not appear twice in any of nine 3-by-3 mini grids on the screen.

iLounge’s top-ranked Sudoku games are ones that offered fully-functional renditions of the game, with impressive interfaces, bonus features, user customization, and pricing as of the time we tested them. The fewer of these features a given game had, the lower it rated. While updates to these games may well be released over time, and their features may change, we couldn’t wait around forever for bad or so-so titles to catch up with ones that were already good or great.

ACTSudoku is a straightforward, light-on-frills presentation of the game with three levels of difficulty and only one style of background and tile art. It contains a random board generator, and by default offers automatic markers to hint at which numbers remain possibilities; unusually, you can only disable the markers by leaving the application and changing settings in the iPhone or iPod touch’s main settings menu. ACTSudoku is also silent; you provide your own iPod mode audio. A state-saving mode lets you return to any game you’ve interrupted.

ACTSudoku is an average title. There is a professional simplicity in its presentation with the automatic markers on, enabling users to more easily see their options, and a pop-up window makes selection of those options very straightforward. However, there’s not much to the title beyond a standard game of Sudoku.