Review: Jason Linhart Enjoy Sudoku

By
Jeremy Horwitz
|
August 1, 2008 11:29 am UTC

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 Enjoy Sudoku ($4) by Jason Linhart; 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.

Enjoy Sudoku has the look and feel of a simple Windows application, with comparatively primitive graphics, clicking sounds, and an interface that is more functional than fun. With 35,000 puzzles built in, the biggest frills in here are a feature that goes out to the Internet to grab a challenge of the day, multi-stage undo and redo features, a Create Puzzle/solver mode, and an automatic pencil marks mode that provides all the possible answers for you to work through and easily solve the puzzle. The pencil mark possibilities are, however, extremely busy on the screen, and the price is steep considering how much more you get from a game like Gameloft’s Platinum Solitaire. Overall, this rates in our D-for-demo category.