Sudoku Universe / 数独宇宙 Reviews

a real good game,makes me peaceful

If you like Sudoku, you'll like this... Recommend.

This game requested "keystrokes from any application". Keylogger? No thanks. Uninstalled as malware.

I enjoy sudoku puzzles to a certain degree, and Sudoku Universe turned out to be a great way to unwind with some number-crunching fun. The game looks good, feels smooth, and offers a solid downtime experience, especially in the easy and medium difficulties. Those puzzles were enjoyable and flowed well, making for a relaxing and satisfying playthrough. Then I hit the hard puzzles. And wow, they are really hard. I spent most of my time in the game tackling these, and while I love a challenge, some of them felt almost too much. One feature I really appreciated was the game keeping track of how many of each number remained—it made finishing up puzzles a breeze when I was down to the last few numbers. But Sudoku Universe does have some serious issues. The color palettes are frustratingly inconsistent, and some combinations make it nearly impossible to see which cells are highlighted. Worse, you can’t manually change them, so you’re stuck exiting and re-entering puzzles until you get a decent color scheme. That’s just bad UI design. The real dealbreaker, though, is the existence of unsolvable puzzles. Towards the end of medium difficulty and into hard, I ran into puzzles that just didn’t add up—literally. After staring at one for half an hour, marking every cell, and still coming up empty, I ran it through a solver… and even the computer had to brute force it. That’s not how sudoku is supposed to work. If a puzzle can’t be solved logically, it’s broken, plain and simple. It’s clear the developers didn’t verify all the puzzles with a solver, which is a huge oversight for a game like this. Overall, Sudoku Universe is a mixed bag. If you’re looking for a casual sudoku experience, the easy and medium puzzles are enjoyable and well worth your time. But if you’re planning to tackle the harder levels, be prepared for frustration—not just from the difficulty, but from the occasional outright broken puzzle. I wanted to give this game a neutral review, but since Steam has no option for that, I marked it as recommended, as it was mostly fun.