Gamertell Review: Crosswords DS
by at May 5, 2008 12:09 am
Sections: 2D, DS & DSi & DSi XL, Exclusives, Features, Genres, Handhelds, Opinions, Puzzle, Reviews
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Despite a few small inconveniences including a couple lame Crosswords clues and selectively missing words in the Anagrams, the portability, number of games, easy-to-use touch controls, low price and the two extra games not advertised on the cover make Crosswords DS a sure-fire winner for any puzzle-lovin’ person.
If your mom likes word puzzles, you will definitely want to consider this one as a Mother’s Day gift.
Crosswords begins with very simple four-by-four square puzzles, with consecutive puzzles increasing in size and difficulty.
Holding the DS sideways, you tap on a square on the touchscreen to see the Across and Down clues on the other screen. To fill in a square you write a letter on the screen, lift your stylus and wait a short moment for the DS to virtually type it in for you. An optional assist feature changes a square’s color to indicate whether or not you write the right letter (and word).
Puzzles are pretty much what you’d expect from the average book you buy at the grocery store, with a few clues in the Easy section being exceptionally lame (“monkey minus ey” and “delete without the consonants”). Of course, with more than 1000 puzzles, you’re going to get a few clunker clues.
The drawing controls are rather intuitive with only a few letters being misinterpreted by the DS. For example, a straight vertical line will yield a capital “L” and not and uppercase “I,” although most sloppy single-stroke letters (including “A”) are usually recognized.
When working for speed, remember that you are also limited to the pace of the presentation. The DS requires almost a second to recognize and draw a letter and then another to auto-move to the next empty square according to the clue type (Across of Down) you have selected, moving left-to-right or top-to-bottom (so no backtracking for us Englisher readin’ peeps).
If you do get stuck, you can cash in a few points to get a hint and rely on the assist feature. Both are nice touches for crossword novices (crosswimps? crossnoobs?) who have to stick to the Easy level games, but easily forgotten by pen puzzlers.
Although it doesn’t indicate it anywhere on the cover, CrossworDS also comes with two other games: Anagrams and Wordsearch.
To play Anagrams, you have six letters to move into spaces to form all of the hidden three-, four-, five- and/or six-letter words. There are also Arrange and Shuffle buttons that will put all the letters in various configurations to help you find more words without actually giving you the answers. The nice part is that the list of words to find is presented alphabetically, so when you have that one pesky five-letter word (or even a weird three-letter word) to find, you can rule out certain combinations according to the words you found around it. The silly part is that some words have been purposefully left out of the system, including “ale” and “rape,” likely to maintain the family-friendly “Everyone” ESRB rating.
The anagrams actually proved to be the most challenging of the Easy level puzzles, since you have to find all the combos to complete the game and hints are not even available (as they are in crosswords).
In terms of the interface, my favorite of the three games was Wordsearch, where you would typically circle words from a list hidden in a grid of jumbled letters. In this DS version, the word list is on the non-touch screen and the jumbled grid is on the touch screen. To select, you simply drag from the one end of a found word to the other and lift. C’est facile, non?
Similar to Crosswords, the limited screen size doesn’t become an issue until you get into the harder puzzles which require a lot of multi-directional scrolling just to see the play area. A puzzle or two in, however, and you’ll be slipping around the game board without issue.
Site [CrossworDS]
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