The Good: Absurd amount of content; good for short bursts; near perfect controls
The Bad: At times predictable, at others deceptive
Picross is a Sudoku that awards you with a picture in the end of the problem–actually solving a problem means to reveal a pic–and that description alone should be enough to explain how addicting the thing can be (or at least how it has been for years with all the several Japanese iterations Nintendo has released since Mario’s Picross in the early 90s). But Picross 3D is the first one to give a conceptual step ahead, and a potentially problematic one: expanding the regular X/Y axes to a 3D cube. How does it fare?
In the most worrisome field–the controls–it fares quite well. The scheme of moving the cube freely through the touch screen and locking it in the pickaxe/brush modes with the D-pad is elegant and intuitive. In the presentation side things have gone well too, with sound and visual effects merging nicely for creating a believably “palpable” feeling–the same goes for 3D animations of the objects revealed at the end of each level. (The lack of Nintendo IPs stuff is unexplainable and unforgivable though.)
The problems in Picross 3D lie in two fronts, one inherent to the proposition other put there by the developers: symmetry of the objects and deliberately hidden clues.
First of all, objects tend to have symmetric sides. Movement tricks aside, it’s hard to imagine a man, truck or fruit without symmetries–and that would lend an involuntary repetitiveness component to the puzzles. Well, the solution found was not to show numeric hints for every line of a given block (like it used to be in 2D puzzles). That certainly did a good job on balancing the difficulty back but the price paid for it was, at several points, to restrain the solutions to a single way of doing it–which is much less desirable than the search for more imaginative items or ways to present them.
Still, even with those limitations Picross 3D ultimately does a good job in fulfilling its goal: to provide a nice casual distraction to have on the go (being on a portable device and all) while offering a more than decent value for those who invest their money on it.