- Only randomly generated puzzles
- Janky UI and controls
- No quality of life features that you'd expect
- You are ruthlessly pressured for time
When I bought this I missed the part of the game description that all puzzles are randomly generated. I simply wouldn't have purchased this if I realized this earlier, but now that I've tried it out I'll share how bad it gets.
UI is poorly done. Your progress could easily be represented by a grid (rows = puzzle size, columns = difficulty, cells = completion status) but what you get instead of this makes it super hard to keep track of what you've completed and what you've mastered. You have to scroll left and right to select puzzle size, then select a sub-difficulty for that particular puzzle size, and only then it displays the completion status of that size/difficulty combination, [b]one at a time[/b]. Awful!
No quality of life features. If I start drawing a line on one side of the cube and move onto another my drawing doesn't stick to that line specifically, I end up drawing over other cells (often without even realizing this) and then wondering why my tiny puzzle is already all wrong. That's just unacceptable. I can live with it for a 2D puzzle but not for a 3D-ish like this. Also instead of the commonly accepted X mark for the crossed-out cells it uses red cells, which is still manageable but instead of fading out the numbers also become light-red making them almost indistinguishable from regular numbers. There is also a weird long delay between finishing a line and having the numbers auto-fade which is very annoying.
But the worst part is that this game does what no pictogram game should ever do. It pressures you for time, [b]hard[/b]. I think the vast majority of pictogram fans would agree that time should not be the challenge in such game. It does not work at all. Simply because having time constraints in fixed puzzles doesn't make sense (just redraw the solutions), but for randomly generated puzzles like here it is even worse. For instance I can solve most 3x3x3 puzzles here in about 30 seconds each, but the "expert" time is set to 15. So I kept generating random puzzles until I got one where there's a 6 (i.e. full line) across an edge so I easily solved that one in 12 seconds and became an "expert" at 3x3x3. That sucks so much. There's an achievement for becoming an "expert" at every size/difficulty combo and I am absolutely not generating thousands of puzzles just to get some randomly easy ones to become an "expert" at them. Screw this game.
