Sudoku: Real Edition — Nerding out with your iPad

We here at Macgasm were sent a serial code from David Jones, the creator of Sudoku Real Edition. Being as though I thoroughly enjoy playing sudoku games I thought I would review it for all of us iPad owners.

Sudoku: Real Edition is a very nicely designed application for the iPad that allows a user to play any of four hundred different Sudoku game boards.  When you start a new game, you are given a choice of four difficulty levels: Easy, Medium, Hard, and Expert.  Each of the four difficulty levels corresponds to 100 levels within the game.

The game works in either landscape or portrait modes. The application also realigns itself on the fly in order to optimize the screen real estate. This is a nice touch.

 Sudoku Real Edition

There are a few issues with the Application, but they aren’t necessarily the end of the world. They can be frustrating depending on your play style.  If you enjoy having the ability to always see the entire game board, you may not like the opaqueness of either the ‘pencil mode’ or the ‘pen mode’ as it covers the surrounding squares.

The second  issue, which is more problematic, is the fact that the application crashes I’d you hit the ‘next’ button while the end of game animation is playing.  The fact that it crashes is not the issue  The fact that you lose your progress is the problem. That means that you have to redo all of the squares that you had finished during the last session.  This can be superbly frustrating, and may cause many players to stop playing.

The final issue is that the dragging and dropping of the numbers within the application does not work.  When a player tries to perform the action the application crashes.  This is obviously not the desired result.

Overall, if you have an iPad and love playing sudoku this is a very good game for $2.99.  While it may have it’s issues, it is not bad for a 1.0 application where the creator did not have access to the hardware. I’m eagerly awaiting an update to fix some of these issues. You can pick up your copy of the game in the app store.

Photo Credit: CaterinaAnna

I'm into everything technology related, particularly anything Apple related. I enjoy programming and tend to lean towards server-based technologies over client-based. You can contact me on twitter, via e-mail, or follow me on friendfeed.