The previous update to this game has turned what was the best kakuro app for almost a decade into a borderline unplayable mess. And the latest update takes away features while changing nothing else. First, the new color scheme and “flat” look is hideously ugly. It’s also less usable—a touch interface with tons of fiddly little buttons crammed onto the screen really needs visible borders. (Imagine the iPhone keyboard without the white squares around the keys.) Second, there’s now a banner ad on the bottom, right where you want to click to unselect the current selection. For a game that I paid for (even if the paid version was merged with the free version a few years ago), this is especially unacceptable. Third, it now randomly pops up intrusive ads. Worst of all, it keeps trying to get me to pay for a “Pro” upgrade. (I have no idea what’s included in “Pro”, but whatever it is, I haven’t needed it for the past decade.) It sometimes even spontaneously triggers a payment confirmation that I have to cancel. Presumably the interface tricked me into clicking a “Upgrade” button that appears under my finger when I’m trying to click something else, or something like that. But however they’re doing it, it’s not just seriously unethical, and annoying, but also a serious violation of Apple’s rules. So, what improvements do we get to compensate for all these downgrades? Not a single one of the features people had requested over the past decade (like an easier way to mark the board and rewind to an earlier mark) has been added. They did finally fix the bug where, on any screen bigger than an iPhone 4, there’s a dead space on the top and bottom that can crash the game if you accidentally click it. But because they filled that dead space with a banner ad that pops open an ad page in Safari if you accidentally click it, this isn’t really an improvement. I wish I could go back to the previous version. A new version came out at some point, and I upgraded hoping it would solve some of the problems. But I’ll never find out, because it disabled enough features that it’s not worth even trying. You can’t even start a game above medium difficulty anymore. So now, it’s gone from a game I pick up every once in a while when I’m not too annoyed to deal with the frustrations to one that I will never even think about playing. Nice job ruining it for good.
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ouma lady
Tdopwer
abarnert