Now that I have 100% Pokemon Picross, I'll share my thoughts on this game
First things first, this is a Free to Play game on the 3DS. You basically need to have picrites (in game currency) to do basically anything. Want to play? Well, then filling a square each requires energy and they take 1 minute to recharge. 1 minute may seem like very little, but keep in mind that puzzles are 10x10 so they require around 60 squares to fill out, assuming you don't make any mistakes. You can quick recharge with picrites but that costs money. Unlocking new zones costs a lot of picrites, 100 and constantly increases each time you unlock a new one. Finally, there is the Alt World and Mega Pencil that requires 300 and 500 picrites to unlock. So in order to do any of the mega evolution puzzles, you need to save up before you can even attempt them. Pokemon also need time to recharge after using their abilities, but I will get into that a bit later. Luckily, there are daily challenges that will eventually give you 10 picrites upon completing within the time limit, so there is still a free way to beat this game.
Picross is a puzzle based game, where there are numbers that give you hints in how exactly to fill out each row and column. I won’t go into the details since it’s hard to explain, as I didn’t fully understand the tips and tricks they teach you in the tutorial until playing it quite a bit. It’s a really simple mechanic, but it nets a lot of puzzles to go through. There is a lot of content in this game too, with 30 zones to unlock and about 300 pokemon to unlock. With the Alt World, the same puzzles get doubled so you have about 600 stages to play. It begins with 10x10 panels, and later moves up to 15x15 and finally 15x20 panels. Games can be completed quickly so it’s a good game for small bursts or when you have a few minutes extra. Each stage will also have a list of missions where completing them will give you more picrites
Each Pokemon stage you complete, you will capture that Pokemon and be able to use their abilities to help you with other puzzles. There are 5 main types of abilities: revealing abilities that reveal panels for you, slowing time and freezing time abilities, autofixing abilities and the blue force abilities which tell you what rows and columns have for sure panels you can fill in or cancel out. Pokemon also come in sizes so some Pokemon will not be able to used on the 15x15 puzzles since they are too small. After you use their abilities, they will have a cooling time before you can use them again, which typically ranges from 1 hour to 24 or 30 hours for the legendary Pokemon
The main issue is, of course that it is Free to Play. You are constantly running out of picrites because it takes a lot to move on to the next area. Despite each stage giving you a few picrites when you win, it still takes a long time to get enough picrites to move to the next area, so I am constantly waiting with nothing to do in the game. You quickly run out of energy after one or two puzzles and will have to wait. Some missions require certain Pokemon to be used and they are unlocked later in the game so you can’t get them all in one go. You will miss out on all the Mega evolutions because it costs 500 to unlock so those will have to be skipped for later too. Of course, you could buy picrites from the eShop, but those are crazy expensive..
Luckily, the final upgrade of energy gives you unlimited energy so you will not have to worry about that, but upgrades require picrites too. After unlocking the Alt World, there is never a shortage of stages stop play. Also, there is a trick into getting unlimited picrites by messing around with the 3DS clock to get the dailies over and over.
tl;dr: 8/10
A fun game that I will recommend to those who likes puzzle games. Even if you don’t, you can still try it out for free :p
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Previous Review: Bravely Default
http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=7897427
NintenDomination [May 2015 - July 2017]
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NintenDomination [2015/05/19 - 2017/07/02]
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