With the opening of Cafe Sudoku, it’s starting to look a lot like Starbucks around here. The Cafe series now encompasses three branches, all serving a similarly tepid brew of classic games dressed up with cosy Sim-style digital lattes and mild power-ups.

Needless to say, the focus in Cafe Sudoku is everyone’s favourite combinatorial logic number puzzle, where you have to complete a 9×9 grid so that all the horizontal and vertical lines, and each marked 3×3 square, contains every digit from one to nine.

You’ll probably already know whether you love Sudoku as way to annihilate boring train journeys, or loathe it as probably the least productive use of your time since watching Quiz Call on Channel Five. Suffice to say that there is nothing in Cafe Sudoku to win over sceptics: if you hated Sudoku in the newspaper, then seeing your virtual shadow scratch its head with a pencil on your Nokia’s screen is unlikely to change your mind.

Even confirmed Sudoku heads might find this café a little annoying. The ridiculous power-ups, where you earn pairs of ‘sneakers’ and new haircuts, are unintentionally funny but get in the way of powering through grids, and the Sim-alike coffee shop adds, well, nothing, to the gameplay.

Playing the game itself is pretty easy. You use the control pad to select an empty square, then hit the number pad or A/B buttons to enter a number. You can select the difficulty of the puzzle from very easy to evil, and Cafe Sudoku boasts an ‘infinite’ number of possible grids (note: not tested). It can be a little difficult to distinguish your inputted numbers from the preset figures, though, and purists might frown at the hints you can request when you think you’re stuck.

Overall, though, four quid is a relatively small price to pay for this efficient and harmless little title. Just make sure you turn off the incredibly irritating background music, or your fellow commuters might rise up as one and pitch you through the carriage window.

Details
Price: £4
Rating: 3+
Size: 2MB
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