iLounge

Company: Sans Pareil

Website: www.Kamicom.net

Title: Kamicom Sudoku

Players: One

Price: $2

Compatible: iPod touch, iPhone, iPhone 3G

Sans Pareil Kamicom Sudoku

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By Jeremy Horwitz

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

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 Kamicom Sudoku ($2) by Sans Pareil/Justin Kaleta; 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.

Kamicom Sudoku has one major advantage over some of its competitors: it has changing backgrounds, which can be unlocked to serve as iPhone/iPod touch art, and the designer bothered to at least create a semi-interesting game board on top of them. Though it is a very simple Sudoku game, and lacks for pencil-style markings, it has three levels of difficulty, 20 different backgrounds to unlock through games, and the ability to save your current progress in all 20 of them at the same time. At the moment, due mostly to the lack of pencil markings, there isn’t enough here to rate Kamicom outside of our D-for-demo category, but the developer claims that updates will make the game better over time. We’ll see.