Puzzler World 2 for Nintendo DS Reviews by Gamers

The Good: Most of the puzzles.

- Crosswords: In addition to a bunch of real, newspaper-style crosswords (9x9 and larger), they also have the normally-annoying "crosswords" where half the grid is black, and half the letters are part of only one word. However, they don't play those as normal crosswords, but in one of three clever ways: In "Fitword", there are no clues; they just give you a blank grid and a list of the words, and you have to place them. In "Backwords", they give you a field full of letters and the across and down clues (unnumbered, but in order), and you have to black out the squares that aren't part of the puzzle. In "Pieceword", they cut the grid into 9, 16, or 25 pieces, and give you the across clues only; your task is to reassemble the puzzle.

- "Link-A-Pix": You're given a grid of squares (from 15x15 to 60x60), some of which contain colored numbers. Each numbered square is an endpoint of a line that color, and that number of squares long. You determine the paths of the lines, and in so doing, create a picture. I wasn't familiar with this puzzle type, but quickly fell in love with it.

- Puzzle quantity: 137 Wordsearch, 137 Sudoku, 101 Crossword, 51 Hide & Seek, 86 Link-A-Pix, 102 Fitword, 51 Backwords, 51 Pieceword, 51 Silhouette, and 560 quick bonus puzzles. About 80 hours' worth of material.

If I could stop there, this game would rate at least a solid 9. But...

The Bad: Did they not beta test this game?

When I buy a game, I expect that all of the puzzles will be solvable, and that the game won't crash under ordinary use. This game did not meet those expectations. One of the bonus puzzles, "Splitwords", has five instances with no solution the game will recognize as correct (the ones attached to Challenge Mode puzzles 45, 109, 256, 275, and 370).

And if you select puzzle 82, expecting to find a crossword, you'll instead crash the game. Just by selecting the puzzle.

If you can get past that, it's a pretty good game.

There were several puzzles that I had never even heard of before(and couldn't figure out despite the instructions). My favorite is backwards(a cross between a search a word and a crossword puzzle) where you use the clues to figure out which letters to black out. I fell in love with that on the PSP crosswords and more but haven't been able to find it anywhere else. There are also the usual fill it ins, sudoku etc. The hint feature is horrible, though, and not helpful at all. I couldn't figure out how to pinpoint the clues that I had trouble with, it seems to be completely random. I loved the wide variety of of puzzles both new and old that were available right from the beginning. There also seemed to be plenty of extra content to unlock.