Cafe Sudoku

We have to say, when Digital Chocolate was deciding which games to launch its Cafe connected gaming service, it chose well in solitaire and sudoku.

They're both widely known games that even – well, especially – your mum and nan can play, and they've got proven popularity amongst mobile gamers. We've already reviewed Cafe Solitaire, which was excellent, so now it's time to turn our attention to Cafe Sudoku.

We'll be reviewing each Cafe game individually as they come out, but Digital Chocolate's connected community works the same way for each one, so we won't rehash the full details (for those, check the Cafe Solitaire review).

The quick overview is that you sign up, and create a little avatar character to represent you. From then, it's about creating your own cafe and signing friends up to play in it, while unlocking new items of clothing for your avatar, and winning trophies in the games to display in your joint.

As a quick guide, the trophies available to win in Cafe Sudoku include Sudoku Instinct (finish five puzzles in under four minutes), Sudoku Talent (finish five Evil-level puzzles without hints) and Sudoku Champion (earn more than 50,000 points playing Cafe Sudoku). You can also track your statistics in the Trophies cabinet in your cafe.

What about the game itself? Discounting the Tutorial, there are five levels of puzzles to solve: Very Easy, Easy, Average, Hard and Evil, which as you'd expect offer an increasing number of Cafe points when you beat them.

The game itself is very neat and tidy, with simple controls involving moving around the sudoku grid and using the number keys to enter digits in the boxes. Holding down a key marks a 'candidate' (i.e. a small number 'pencilled in' to show it's a possible for that box).

The visuals are predictably not on the flashy side, but everything's well presented and readable onscreen, and it fits in well with the graphical style already seen in Cafe Solitaire. The puzzles offer a good range of difficulty, and we're still in shock at just how evil the Evil puzzles are, so there's plenty of depth to it.

Meanwhile, if you need a bit of help, there's a good hints system, which lets you show the next cell, solve a cell, or check all the cells you've filled in.

More generally, we're already detecting a theme in the Cafe games since, like Cafe Solitaire before it, Cafe Sudoku isn't resting on its connected laurels. Even considered as a standalone sudoku game, it's one of the better mobile ones, although Gameloft's Platinum Sudoku just edges it for playability.

We personally prefer Cafe Solitaire, due to the greater variety offered by all the different solitaire variants. However, that's hardly a criticism of sudoku, whose appeal diminishes the more you muck around with the basic rules.

Our ultimate conclusion, then, is that even if you already have a preferred mobile sudoku game, the connected elements make Cafe Sudoku an excellent purchase.