Sudoku Master Edition: Puzzles

I downloaded the game and realized there were ads underneath the game being played. There were also loud and annoying ads after the game was completed. I paid $4.99 to remove ads. The ads are still there — all of them. I wrote the game support group to find out what I should have expected when I paid to remove ads, and I did not get a response. I think they are dishonest. My advise to anyone using this game is to play it with the ads and to not pay any money to remove the ads. No one will remove them, and no one will respond to you. If I could give a lower mark than one star, I would. Update: It has only been one day, and after I heard from the developers, I tried their suggestion. The ads are now gone, and I couldn’t be happier with the game. I like playing this game, and I am happy to find out that the people who developed it care enough about it to take care of the people who play it. My apologies for jumping to conclusions; I have run into game developers who are not interested in how their game affects those who play it, and I am glad to see that you are not one of them.

I'm new to Sudoku, so I'm not sure how it would typically be scored, but the way this game does it is silly. When you play a tile, the name of the tile is multiplied by a number which decreases as the timer counts up. This scoring system allows for a user to be presented with the "same" board as another, execute the exact same sequence of moves with the same timing, and come to a different score. To do this, all you must do is permute all of the tile names, i.e., replace all 1s with 9s, all 2s with 1s, all 3s with 2s and so on. This doesn't really change the board since you could replace the numbers with letters or glyphs and the structure of the soduko board remains the same - there is still one one of each type of tile in each row, column, and square. For a perfectionist like myself, this scoring system causes me to constantly restart games until I get that perfect start that allows me to play a bunch of 9s in the beginning. Ideally, the tiles would count evenly, since it doesn't really matter which tiles you are playing. If you are playing tiles at all then you're making progress. My suggestion would be to instead measure how sparse the board is (since play is more difficult the fewer tiles on the board) and multiply this value by the value determined by the timer. There are of course other options. I just don't like the way it is done now. Other than that, this app is awesome. 4/5

This latest update has introduced a bunch of bugs. Some are so fundamental as to make the game almost unusable now - it doesn’t remove notes as it’s supposed to when a number is locked in to a row, and just now I noticed it actually let me enter the number 2 twice in one row. The auto-fill function (for when there’s just one number in a segment remaining) has also stopped working properly, and all of a sudden the Apple Pencil integration is allowing non-pencil input, drawing on the notepad or filling number boxes with handwriting even when I’m not using the pencil, just tapping the screen with my finger! Also, the numbers no longer “go away” when they’re all placed. It used to be that when you had 9x 2s, the 2 would disappear as an option. Now it stays there, even though you can’t use it any more. This was definitely the best sudoku app in the App Store, up until two days ago. Now.... eh. Needs some help! Edit: updating to 5 stars based on developer response and quick resolution of reported issues! Mistakes happen but what matters is how you respond to them. And this team responded exactly as they should. Thanks, guys!