Crosspix

Have you ever fancied yourself as the next Leonardo Da Vinci? We all know that he was a pretty impressive painter but his creativity in particular his inventiveness is sometimes overlooked.

Well fortunately this game, Crosspix, uses both your artistic abilities and partners it with logic, making an entertaining puzzle game which rewards you with pretty pictures you’ve managed to create through solving the riddle of numbers. For those of you who’re used to Sudoku or Kakuro, mixed with painting by numbers and minesweeper you’ll kind of have half an idea of what this game must be like.

Basically you have a grid and a sequence of numbers which you must interpret and relay by marking the square appropriately – either with paint or a cross. By placing a cross you can try to do some working out, by painting the square you’ll either be rewarded with the paint going on (proving you were right) or with a rumble from the vibration and a cross appearing – meaning you have made a mistake and lose a life. You have a total of 8 mistakes allowed per picture before you fail and will be forced to restart the picture from scratch. The 8 lives you have are definitely enough to give you a challenge but in earlier levels you will virtually complete them first time, in later stages you’ll be screaming for more chances! Fortunately, you have unlimited attempts to create the elusive masterpieces.

The pictures cover various themes – from clothing and sports to school equipment many more. Some of the designs are very simple and straight forward to guess and do correctly, but many more are far more fiddly to do correctly and will no doubt have you pulling your hair out in frustration.

As much fun as it is to get stuck right into the game from the first time you load it, it’s worthwhile you taking just a few minutes to familiarise yourself with the rules and playing the tutorial which will show you the ropes.

This game is a little bit frustrating and quite repetitive at points. Topics like sports for example will give you a grid of 10x10 squares. One picture will be of a racquet and a ball, another will be a shuttlecock and another will be a bowling ball and skittle. As you can imagine there’s only 10 pictures to decipher in total and without thinking you’ll be rattling your way through them all. It’s only when you hit the bigger grids of 15x15 or 20x20 squares will you be left to guess just what the items will be and more importantly, where the right place to paint is.

Overall this game is an excellent bit of distraction for you and will provide your brain with plenty of fun challenging pictures for you to try and work out. This game is certainly good for anyone of any age and will definitely be good for more mature gamers too who aren’t really into the fast paced games that are around.

Rating 83%

Positives

Challenging and mentally stimulating

Plenty of pictures to keep you entertained

Quite a few themes to choose from

Simple controls

Negatives

Quite repetitive

Not for those who fancy a game with more action