Japanese Puzzles

Over the past year or so, we've been inundated with sudoku games. At one point, it seemed like what was once the preserve of the businessman bored on the way to work (or at work for that matter) was being played by everyone from lusty housewives waiting for the milkman to toddlers resting the puzzle pages of The Times on the seats of their tricycles.

Now that things have quietened down somewhat, many developers have had their fill of sudoku games, once again focusing on churning out more of the old favourite symbol-matching puzzlers. We're still waiting for the inevitable porndoku, mind.

Japanese Puzzles doesn't go for such cheap tricks, though. Instead, we're offered a collection of three genuine classic puzzle games, sudoku and its lesser-known cousins kakuro and tenpenki.

If anything, kakuro is more challenging that sudoku, being based more on the arithmetic of numbers rather than just the mere presence of them. The kakuro board is filled with columns and rows of various lengths, each having a number at the end, showing what the numbers in the row/column have to add up to.

If this all sounds a little like being stapled to a wooden school desk by a school master, then tenpenki should appeal. It's still a challenging game, leaving you to create a picture out of pixels from a series of numerical clues. However, not only do you get a picture to gaze upon at the end, but it also stimulates a more visual part of the brain, leaving you to spot likely patterns often present in the frequently symbol-like objects.

Japanese Puzzles is fairly well suited for veterans and late attendees to the sudoku convention alike, then. You can spend just a couple of minutes on an easy puzzle, or take on one of the more involved game modes at a fairly unforgiving difficult level right from the outset.

The Challenge mode sees you attempt a series of puzzles, in whichever size, difficulty and game type that you fancy. The slightly more original Voyage mode features a spider web-like level select screen filled with stages of each type of puzzle. You have to move between spokes of the web towards the centre, but you don't actually get to choose which puzzle to play to start with. Rather you jab at the '5' key fruit machine-style and wait for the select cursor to land where it may.

Japanese Puzzles may tick all the proverbial boxes in terms of accessibility and longevity, but we can't help but feel that it has been glued together from a selection of older games, back when sudoku and its chums reminded more of eastern mystery than fingers discoloured by newsprint.

The additional modes are very welcome, but they're also rather workmanlike. Presentation is equally uninspiring, with the single-screen nature of even the larger puzzles meaning that numbers in the games are too small to look at comfortably for the length of time the more demanding puzzles require.

Needless to say, though, these are the words of a jaded reviewer who has endured more sudoku mobile games than is strictly healthy – with bedroom walls covered in scrawls of half-filled 9x9 blocks and dreams haunted by the thundering rumble of stampeding number 3s and the gnashing teeth of angry and downright stubborn number 9s.

If you've had enough of sudoku, then you'll probably be used to similar symptoms. If not though, Japanese Puzzles is a package to be defined more by its value than its presentational shortcomings.