DS review – Crosswords DS

Crosswords DS epitomises Nintendo’s highly successful Touch Generations approach to making games. It features a highly accessible concept that is familiar to almost everyone, a clean and simple interface which is easy to navigate, and most importantly, it contains hours and hours of fun. These three themes are common to all successful casual games and Crosswords DS has them in spades.

The game features 1000 crosswords, as well as anagrams and word search puzzles, which should be enough to keep even the most avid crossword buff entertained for months. The gentle difficulty curve allows players of all ages to enjoy the game, with simple puzzles for the younger crowd and extremely difficult options for crossword veterans. The anagram and word search options provide a nice diversion and are fantastic fun in their own right.

Entering words into the grid or selecting letters in the other modes is extremely simple, thanks to the excellent handwriting recognition and touchscreen control. The puzzles and clues are displayed clearly, making viewing the puzzles easy, even for the most hard of seeing. The intuitive touchscreen interface of the DS also makes navigating around the larger puzzles a breeze.

Conclusion
As a puzzle game fan, I have seen the genre evolve so much over the last couple of decades. With each new generation of video games, it seems developers just keep adding layer upon layer of complexity to try to make their titles stand out from the crowd. So-much-so that some modern puzzle games are so convoluted and complex that it is difficult to ever fully understand them.

Crossword puzzles on the other hand are one of the oldest, simplest and most enduring forms of puzzles, electronic or otherwise. It takes no explaining how to play and even someone who has never played can work it out almost straight away.

Thankfully, titles like Brain Training, Sudoku, Picross and now Crosswords DS have brought electronic puzzle gaming back to its roots by providing simple, repetitive tasks that are challenging and truly fun to play. That is why I just love Crosswords DS. It captures the simple interface and great design of traditional crosswords and turns it into a DS game that I can use on my daily commute to and from work. Yes I can walk into any newsagent or book shop and buy a book of crosswords for less, but there is something about Crosswords DS that just seems to make it worth the extra expense.

Score 4/5 Good

Tags: anagrams, crosswords, crosswords DS, ds, puzzle games, word puzzles, word search