Kakuro u

I’m giving only 4 stars because… I’m not sure this game is even playable without a paid account at the moment, because of bugs in the way IAP and ads work. Which I know because my paid account somehow turned into a free one in a previous update. They manually restored it for me, which is very cool, but obviously it would be better if it didn’t happen in the first place. And there have been a few times over the many years where the game just didn’t work for months (e.g., way back when, IIRC, the iPhone 6 came out, it couldn’t handle the extra screen space and would crash if you clicked there). Of course most games from that long ago were just abandoned and won’t work on anything newer than iOS 9 or something, so not having this game for a few months every few years is not a huge tragedy by comparison. But once you get past that, it’s as great as it ever was, and miles ahead of any other Kakuro app I’ve found. It can generate puzzles that are genuinely difficult but not unsolvable—the only other apps that have any difficult puzzles have a small number (and often charge you for them) rather than an endless stream of new ones. And the whole UI is designed around assisting you in solving those difficult puzzles. It’s a little messy and maybe hard to figure out at first, and kind of ugly (and changes over the years have made it uglier). But as far as usability once you learn it, it’s amazing. Also, it doesn’t hide behind a bunch of irrelevant gamification features. There’s counts of how many games you’ve won and a few other little things, but no big 30-second celebration when you win or coins to grind for or cheats to ration or special event modes or any of that. If you enjoy Kakuro as a game you don’t need them, and if not, they won’t help, so this app doesn’t have them.

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.

Works fine for me on iPad mini 2, iOS 8.1.