Glitchy but great
I’m giving only 4 stars because… I’m not sure this game is even playable without a paid account at the moment, because of bugs in the way IAP and ads work. Which I know because my paid account somehow turned into a free one in a previous update. They manually restored it for me, which is very cool, but obviously it would be better if it didn’t happen in the first place. And there have been a few times over the many years where the game just didn’t work for months (e.g., way back when, IIRC, the iPhone 6 came out, it couldn’t handle the extra screen space and would crash if you clicked there). Of course most games from that long ago were just abandoned and won’t work on anything newer than iOS 9 or something, so not having this game for a few months every few years is not a huge tragedy by comparison.
But once you get past that, it’s as great as it ever was, and miles ahead of any other Kakuro app I’ve found.
It can generate puzzles that are genuinely difficult but not unsolvable—the only other apps that have any difficult puzzles have a small number (and often charge you for them) rather than an endless stream of new ones. And the whole UI is designed around assisting you in solving those difficult puzzles. It’s a little messy and maybe hard to figure out at first, and kind of ugly (and changes over the years have made it uglier). But as far as usability once you learn it, it’s amazing.
Also, it doesn’t hide behind a bunch of irrelevant gamification features. There’s counts of how many games you’ve won and a few other little things, but no big 30-second celebration when you win or coins to grind for or cheats to ration or special event modes or any of that. If you enjoy Kakuro as a game you don’t need them, and if not, they won’t help, so this app doesn’t have them.
But once you get past that, it’s as great as it ever was, and miles ahead of any other Kakuro app I’ve found.
It can generate puzzles that are genuinely difficult but not unsolvable—the only other apps that have any difficult puzzles have a small number (and often charge you for them) rather than an endless stream of new ones. And the whole UI is designed around assisting you in solving those difficult puzzles. It’s a little messy and maybe hard to figure out at first, and kind of ugly (and changes over the years have made it uglier). But as far as usability once you learn it, it’s amazing.
Also, it doesn’t hide behind a bunch of irrelevant gamification features. There’s counts of how many games you’ve won and a few other little things, but no big 30-second celebration when you win or coins to grind for or cheats to ration or special event modes or any of that. If you enjoy Kakuro as a game you don’t need them, and if not, they won’t help, so this app doesn’t have them.
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Ruined by updates
A previous update to this game has turned what was the best kakuro app for almost a decade into a borderline unplayable mess. And the next update took away features while changing nothing else. And the latest one makes it unplayable. You can’t even start a new game, because all the difficulty levels have weird labels about ads instead of being level numbers, and then, when selected, they each give some different error about some GDPR service. So, that’s that; I can’t play even if I wanted to. But I rarely wanted to anymore anyway, for quite some time. Here’s my review of the previous changes to explain why: 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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Response from developer
Hello, please email support@thechesssolitairesudokufactory.com so that we can get you back your paid for version.
Kakura
Love this game, keeps you thinking.
No hard levels
Please reinstate the harder levels !!!
Better options out there if they are not re introduced
Better options out there if they are not re introduced
Ruined by updates
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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