Toon-Doku for Nintendo DS Reviews & Ratings by IGN

God bless the lack of trademark and licensing for Sudoku. Its popularity in newspapers, magazines, and books all over the world has turned this basic number crossword puzzle into an absolute craze, and no one has to pay a single royalty to any property owner. Of course, this means that there's an absolute flood of Sudoku in the market, more so in the world of videogames. So developers late on the Sudoku train have been trying to put their own spin on Sudoku to get noticed in the sea of me-too, cash-in-on-the-craze Sudoku games.



Toon-Doku's idea? Pictures! That's right, let's take a game where familiar and recognizable arabic numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 are turned into ice cream cones, cakes, animal heads...anything. In concept, I suppose I can understand this idea, since obviously, Sudoku isn't about math but about placing nine different symbols into a grid. But let's be realistic for a second: Sudoku's success spawned from players' ability to immediately know the nine symbols they're working with...and trust me, it's a lot easier to mentally retain and recall that you're missing the number 8 in a specific column, row, or quadrant than it is to figure out where the star, tree, or truck should go. Talk about hurting the brain.



So, just in case you have no clue on the magic of Sudoku, here's the design in a nutshell: you've got a grid of nine rows and nine column, forming 81 squares. In a Sudoku puzzle, each row, column, and the nine three-by-three quadrants can only have one instance of each number one through nine. By using the solidified numbers given by the Sudoku puzzle maker, players use their powers of deduction to assign each square in the grid that number one through nine. There's only one solution to a Sudoku puzzle, and the difficulty of a puzzle depends on how many numbers the puzzle creator gives.



To remove the numbers from Sudoku almost entirely wrecks the immediate appeal of the overall design. But that's what Toon-Doku's hook is -- to remove numbers and replace them with every day objects. The manual states, "Instead of using 9 numbers, you can use 9 images. It's that simple!" If only. Can you think of a set group of nine objects more immediately recognizable than the numbers 1 through 9? Doubtful. It's just head-hurtingly painful to stare at a grid of custom artwork and instinctively use the powers of deduction to know where a corn cob should go. Sorry, but no.







Luckily you can go into Toon-Doku's options menu and choose the 1 through 9 graphics instead of the default set of random images, or better yet, doodle up your own ideas of what 1 through 9 should be. But then, you've pretty much removed the game's hook from the equation at this point, and you might as well go with the other, better choices of DS Sudoku. Toon-Doku doesn't have much to offer that hasn't been given away in other versions of Sudoku on the Nintendo DS. Visually the game's clearly aiming at the younger crowd, with a "We're not Japanese but we really want to be" art style of big head, gigantic eyed characters personifying the computer AI opponents, as well as the ability to simplify sudoku into smaller grids for those who get overwhelmed by the tough puzzles.



There are some clever elements in Toon-Doku's Sudoku engine, including the ability to drag and drop the specific symbols from off the grid onto the grid -- or, even better, "clone" symbols already on the grid and drop them some place else. But this interface definitely doesn't beat out the best of the sudoku bunch: the extra mode in Brain Age and Brain Age 2. And even the multiplayer extras, including the ability to trade pieces of custom art from one system to the other, isn't enough of an incentive to choose Toon-Doku over the simpler offerings.



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