Sudoku Ball Detective is a weird attempt at putting the popular number game into a mystery game. A murder at an upscale party has occurred. As the main detective in the case, you have to discover the clues by solving the Sudoku puzzles on a ball. After you fill in all of the numbers, the clues in the house are revealed. These clues will eventually lead you to who is the murderer.
The whole layout is extremely awkward. The houses are built on a world which you have to rotate by holding down the right mouse button. This is a strange way to move from one building to another. It is also a very unnecessary attempt to put a three dimensional spin on what would have been better done in a two dimensional world.
The graphics on this game look like they were bad graphics imported from the 1990s. The whole beginning was so choppy that it was just hard to watch and click forward on. It barely managed to convey some of the clues that it was supposed to. It would have helped had they just broken it up into panels instead of trying to make a movie.
It would have helped had they added some voice actors. But sadly, the lack of voices just emphasized the lameness of the script. Just the voices would have added some sorely needed character depth to the story.
Game play wasn’t all that innovative. A circle appeared with the numbers. When you got a row or column right, it turned yellow. That was about the extent of the game board. You had to continually rotate the Sudoku Ball to get to new game boards. This was more annoying than anything. It also got confusing at times because there were extra numbers in the background that bore no relationship to the standard nine squares. It was like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It just didn’t work.
While a mystery game involving Sudoku might have some potential, this game fails on so many scores. The murder mystery wasn’t all that interesting. The story failed to get you to actually care about who the murderer was. But the worst part was the game play itself. It lacked imagination and creativity in translating Sudoku into an actual mystery. The game needs some major work on graphics, the storyline and the game play. I recommend not playing or buying this one until they at least fix the boards enough that they aren’t a massive ball of numbers trying to be a Sudoku game.
