Kakuro

Well

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.

This is by far the best version and I have tried many! The layout and submenus are so user friendly. And for those of us who like playing at night before sleep it has the BEST dark mode, no more bright blinding background, that keeps you up! But a beautiful black background and dimmer lettering mode! To give a full review, there is one submenu where the “sliders” at the bottom are still messed up, but now that I know they actually DO read the reviews I am confident they will look into that too! Update: The developers got back to me and gave me back my paid version! Old review:Used to be the best, USED TO Now, even though I bought it way back when, it wants me to pay to upgrade so I can play the more difficult levels. I already paid. I will not pay again! I would rather find another to pay for than put up with that kind of deceit.

One of the best apps out there for this game, thank you.

Good game

Every other button I pushed took me to an ad. Not a bad layout. Not intuitive.

Terrible app. I downloaded, and could not even see what I was doing. Just saw numbers on a black screen and big ads at the bottom. Not user friendly at all.

It used to work and now it won’t load so I can’t play anymore.

I used to use this app pretty often, and I was really good at it. I purchased it when it was new in 2009. The latest update added ads, the “option” to update to pro; which I would assume is ad-free, but does nothing. So instead I’m forced to watch ads that i can’t click out of and mess with my timing on the app. Then there’s the lack of responsiveness on the app. It went from a fully functioning touch screen to smaller buttons and slow responses. For instance, when clicking a number triangle you see the options but you can’t click the done button because they decreased the size of clickable area and get stuck clicking it a few times until released. I used to enjoy this app but I won’t use it again until they fix this terrible update

Actually hate them for updating this... was in my opinion one of the best kakuro games before via layout and design. Now the buttons are harder to hit, can’t visually see which are hit or not unless you strain your eyes, the timer isn’t working properly now either. So trying to improve to beat my time on master difficulty is basically null and void until they fix it. Also now the only way to not have the apparently 6 second win time on the difficulty is to reset my statistics beating the whole point of trying to improve my record...