No Frills Cross Sums is, well, it’s a no frills version of Cross Sums. You’d have never guessed that from the title, eh readers?
For those of you in the audience wondering what a cross sum actually is, it’s a little grid puzzle thing with numbers on either end of the grid where you have to place numbers inside said grid to reach the numbers on either end of the grid. Phew!
As you’d expect it’s not quite that simple – the numbers you place can only be between 1 and 9 and you’re not allowed to duplicate numbers in the columns or rows. You can play on one of two grid sizes with adjustable difficulty levels.
Like the name suggests, there’s little more to the thing and providing you queue up your own music or background entertainment all should be good in the world. I did have a small issue with being constantly flashed at whenever I placed a duplicate number (sometimes you just want to put one down and then change the other number fully aware that it’s a duplicate. It’s a bit jarring having your train of thought kicked awry and having to reboot the segment of your brain that contained THE GRAND PLAN FOR SUCCESSTM).
Niggle that can likely be avoided by merely having a brain that can cope with even the most elementary of maths aside, you get precisely what you’d expect from this release and if it’s some plain no frills cross sum action on the television that you seek – well, you know precisely where to look, right?
This title was 200 Points at the time of writing this review but has since been reduced to 80 Points.
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From my time with it in review, I’d say it’s rather plain, but solid. Better than the previous Sudoku game, if only for the color customization. I changed the colors from the default, especially the red flashing warning you mentioned. That made it better. I wish more games made the same effort to allow for custom colors. Plus, cross sums seems easier than sudoku to understand.
Not the greatest game ever, but not crap like some of the other things out there.
Easier? I thought Cross Sums was harder – which is a good thing. There’s more thinking involved. But board size could be larger.
I guess everyone’s different in how they solve puzzles, but these seemed easier to grasp for me. The amount of thinking was probably the same, but just in a different way, if you get my drift.
If the board size were larger, wouldn’t the numbers have to be smaller. Or the board would have to scroll, in which case it wouldn’t all be on screen at once. That’d probably make it harder, wouldn’t you think?
Same for me, I’ve not been able to wrap my head around Sudoku but Cross Sums make far more logical sense to me.
I am a bit crap with maths though.
Well, fortunate the numbers only go up to 45 then, eh?