Picross 3D

Picross 3D is an incredibly unique and amazing puzzle game, boasting catchy music, funny animations, and insane addictiveness make this one of the best DS games of all time

One of the best Logic/Puzzle games EVER! Yeah, thats actually true! At least top 10 :P A sequel is released on the 3DS in Japan. I want to play that game sooo bad! :D

Some limitations prevent it from being a killer addiction, but Picross 3D is well-executed and long-lasting enough to keep you coming back for more. The Good: Absurd amount of content; good for short bursts; near perfect controls The Bad: At times predictable, at others deceptive Picross is a Sudoku that awards you with a picture in the end of the problem--actually solving a problem means to reveal a pic--and that description alone should be enough to explain how addicting the thing can be (or at least how it has been for years with all the several Japanese iterations Nintendo has released since Mario's Picross in the early 90s). But Picross 3D is the first one to give a conceptual step ahead, and a potentially problematic one: expanding the regular X/Y axes to a 3D cube. How does it fare? In the most worrisome field--the controls--it fares quite well. The scheme of moving the cube freely through the touch screen and locking it in the pickaxe/brush modes with the D-pad is elegant and intuitive. In the presentation side things have gone well too, with sound and visual effects merging nicely for creating a believable "palpable" feeling--the same goes for 3D animations of the objects revealed at the end of each level. (The lack of Nintendo IPs stuff is unexplainable and unforgivable though.) The problems in Picross 3D lie in two fronts, one inherent to the proposition other put there by the developers: symmetry of the objects and deliberately hidden clues. First of all, objects tend to have symmetric sides. Movement tricks aside, it's hard to imagine a man, truck or fruit without symmetries--and that would lend an involuntary repetitiveness component to the puzzles. Well, the solution found was not to show numeric hints for every line **** block (like it used to be in 2D puzzles). That certainly did a good job on balancing the difficulty back but the price paid for it was, at several points, to restrain the solutions to a single way of doing it--which is much less desirable than the search for more imaginative items or ways to present them. Still, even with those limitations Picross 3D ultimately does a good job in fulfilling its goal: to provide a nice casual distraction to have on the go (being on a portable device and all) while offering a more than decent value for those who invest their money on it.

You probably have a decent idea what Picross 3D is if you're looking at these reviews. In summary, it's a math/number based puzzle game. You're given a large cube which is made up of many smaller cubes. On some of the smaller cubes, there's a number. This number denotes how many of the cubes in the underlying column or row are part of the object that you're trying to uncover. As the game advances, some number will have a circle or a square around them. These symbols tell you if the the cubes in that given row are all together, in two chunks, or in more than two chunks. I love this type of game, and I like to think that I'm pretty good at them. Minesweeper is one of my favorite past-times. This game could've been up there, if not for a few fatal flaws. First off and most damaging is the inability to figure out some of the puzzles using only your math skills. For the most part you can figure out a puzzle using math, but far too often this is thrown out the window, and you're left to guess. This could easily have been fixed by having a "blocks left" counter, much like the "bombs remaining" counter in minesweeper. The next problem has more to do with the DS itself. The numbers and symbols can be rather difficult to read sometimes. This can easily be fixed by rotating the cube to a better angle, but when you're in the zone you might find yourself making a mistake that didn't look like a mistake from the angle you had been looking from. I'm playing on a standard DSi. This might not be a problem on a DSi XL. This is a great game for traveling, short or long distance. There's a nice quick-save feature so if you're halfway through a difficult puzzle but need to turn off your DS, you can do so without losing any progress. Lots of puzzles in this package, as well as a puzzle editor and more puzzles available online. If something had been done to make all the puzzles solvable without guess-work, I probably would've given this game a nine.

This is a good puzzle game that only keeps some of the Picross ideas in the transition to 3D. The puzzles are nice to solve and I find playing this game a very relaxing experience. There is, however, one thing I can't stand about this game: the stupid mascot that keeps jumping around and making faces all the time. I find it to be nothing but a nuisance and adds nothing to the game, and sometimes it's even distracting when you only have one minute to finish it and you feel you can kind of make it in time, and then you see that stupid thing moving around and you lose focus. The tutorial levels are very well designed, are not too long and they give you all the information you need to start solving puzzles. There are also some bonus levels that, in my opinion, are even more fun to solve, so that's one other nice thing about this game. I would have given it a higher rating but all I can think of when I see this game is that stupid duck.