Review: CrossworDS

Mike Bantick
Tuesday, 17 June 2008 04:18

Opinion and Analysis

The perfect commuter companion. Nintendo are selling a significant amount of hand-held DS units.  Adults are an increasing market for the DS as Nintendo pushes the Training series of games.

CrossworDS
	Developer	Nintendo
	Publisher	Nintendo
	Rating	G
DS

First there were the Brain Trainers, now DS titles such as Sight and Face Training are part of the DS library.

Given the ease of play, these titles are perfect to replace the newspaper crossword on the way to work. 

Now specifically Nintendo bring you CrossworDS to specifically target the crossword loving crowd.  But what can CrossworDS bring to the commute that a $5 puzzle book or newspaper cannot?

Firstly, over 1000 crossword puzzles presented in a crisp no-nonsense way, ranging in difficulty and providing a hints system and unlockable incentive along the way.

To flesh out the experience CrossworDS provides two other categories of word games; Word Search and Anagrams.

Word Search will have you running the stylus across the touch screen looking for the list of words hidden in the jumble of letters.  Words can appear forwards, backwards and diagonally positioned in the word grid.

Anagrams tasks you with making as many single words out of the letters presented.  Dragging the letter tiles around to form words in as quick a time as possible.

Crossword is why we are here however, Clues and the full grid appear on the left hand screen (the DS is held at 90 degrees for this one), whilst the player navigates and writes answers on the touch screen.

A varying level hints system is available.  First up at the start of the puzzle you can choose to enable visual clues to incorrect letters, this is makes the puzzle almost too easy.