Kakuro (Breakpoint)

The Japanese puzzler has featured so frequently on mobile that it virtually deserves its own sub genre. There are three main offenders in the ring. The first is the daddy of them all, sudoku. The other two, kakuro and tenpenki, retain something of a lower profile. Tenpenki's a more visual game and has hidden under a number of guises without even a passing reference to eastern origins.

Kakuro is a more lumbering beast, however. Playing like a numerical crossword with OCD, you need to make sure the numbers in each column and row add up to the additional numbers at the end of each row and column. Just like sudoku, it's a mechanic that can make you feel like a genius after completing a fairly simple puzzle, only to crush your self-esteem to dust in the next minute with a puzzle of only moderate difficulty.

Since kakuro is hardly the most visual of feasts, this digital interpretation tries to offset mental anguish by supplying a cartoon mentor to help you along the way. Think Doctor Kawashima on weight gain powder and no exercise, and you'll have a roughly accurate image of your Kakuro sensei.

To complement his tubby presence, there are also some nice little visual touches in the interface. When you edit a square, a little pencil graphic appears as if you're struggling with a broadsheet rather than a mobile keypad. Unfortunately, underneath all these superfluous additions, the means by which the actual kakuro board is displayed is very simplistic. You can't move the board, scroll or zoom in. Instead, the whole puzzle is displayed on a single width of the phone's screen.

Although this makes sense in terms of allowing your logic circuits to take the whole conundrum in, it also means that the clue numbers – those telling you the totals of the rows and columns – are incredibly small. It's the same deal for the notes you can leave in the boxes, too. A crucial part of both kakuro and sudoku for the average player is being able make notes on possible numbers on the board, but by the time you've made a few, your optician would probably recommend walking away altogether.

This basic underlying visual interface is matched by a very simple gameplay structure. There isn't one as such. Rather, you can choose whether you want to play an easy, medium or hard puzzle. There's no real progression to be made.

Upon starting a new game, the board is randomly generated. Other than the smug sense of self-satisfaction that completing a kakuro puzzle offers by its very nature, the only other challenge is in beating your previous times for each difficulty level. This kakuro game also offers a board editor so you can fashion three of your own kakuro nightmares for your friends, but we're guessing this'll only really appeal to the puzzle sadists.

In many respects Breakpoint's Kakuro offers a similar experience to a newspaper sudoku puzzle. You can play a different puzzle each day and feel satisfied at the end not only for completing the thing, but also for dealing with the sheer fiddliness of it all. With its inviting superficial presentation, Kakuro seems to offer a polished and professional representation of the classic puzzle. Scratch underneath the shiny veneer, though, and you'll find the dull luminescence of a bog standard kakuro game.