Go! Sudoku (PlayStation Portable, 2006)

Reviewer: Lisa Shea "LisaShea.com" (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

We love Sudoku. We play it online quite a lot, and use the Brain Age version of Sudoku frequently as well. We thought it'd be great to have a PSP game solely dedicated to Sudoku. Unfortunately, the Go! Sudoku implementation was poor.

First off, about the gameplay in general. You get a Sudoku board, can choose from puzzles of various difficulties, and can choose a background theme. Once you play a game on a given profile, that's it. You can't play it again. Since you rarely "memorize" a board, it seems a shame not to let you replay it without resetting everything.

Next, part of how you play Sudoku is by marking the "possibles" in a given square until you figure out what it really should be. In the Brain Age version, you can do that. Here, you can't. Your only choice is to turn on "help" which then marks ALL possibles on the entire board, all the time. With help turned on, all you do is look at the board for the square with only 1 possible in it, and put that number there. Then the board updates and you look for the next square with only 1 possible in it. It's not a game at all. They should have let you put in possibles yourself, instead of making you try to juggle that all in your head.

The game has a really annoying redraw problem. Every 10 minutes or so, the game freezes with a "please wait" message that sits there for perhaps 30 seconds. Then it lets you play some more. So you might be right in the middle of doing something, and suddenly you have to twiddle your thumbs until it unfreezes. Apparently this has to do with battery charge - and the lower your battery gets, the more frequently the pop-up comes up. It counts the 'freeze time' against your total time to solve, too. Bad, bad, bad.

If you type in a wrong number, it IMMEDIATELY tells you that number is wrong. This makes no sense in Sudoku. Part of the challenge is to follow a road until you get stuck, then to backtrack and figure out what you did wrong. It's like a crossword puzzle or a maze. To just flag you immediately loses that aspect of the solving.

This is one of the only games that I've played that I completely DO NOT recommend at all. If you want to play Sudoku, buy another game. Don't buy this one.

Go! Sudoku, is an interactive experience that requires gamers to place numbers inside a grid so that every column, every row and every box contains the number one to nine only once.

Go! Sudoku contains 1,000 puzzles in four single-player difficulty levels, along with many multiplayer modes. GET ADDICTED. This game should be in every puzzle fan's collection! TONS of replay value for this great number game AND you can take it on the go with you anywhere.

-- A Review Written by GameGo, an eBay store --
--visit stores.ebay.com/gamego for this game and hundreds more. --

This game is very challenging. I'm a beginner, and they have a ton of levels for me, as well as a tutorial. There are levels, which you can set, to have the background as fire, water, earth, and air. The music is great as well, very calming. This is a great game to play while waiting for anything...airport, in the car, during a break at school or work, on a roadtrip, etc. Very great game and very addictive!

Sudoku is a great addictive puzzle game. Once you start playing a game, you won't stop until it is solved or beat your best record. Pop-ups saying wait while playing the game is way too much annoying. It destroy the excitement of trying to solve a puzzle real fast.
It was a big mistake getting one but at least I didn't pay for the full regular price of the game.

Simply put. I love sudoku. I saw this on ebay and placed several bids to get it because I absolutely love. I would have this game on my phone but I don't have enough phone memory to support this awesome program. So I'm very VERY happy to have this number strategy on my psp.