A few more days and Picross 3D: Round 2 finally gets released in Europe. The preview I played a while back left a pretty strong impression on me, something I didn’t expect from a simple puzzle game. After playing the full version, I’m happy to call myself a fan of Picross 3D.
Simple but well-crafted gameplay
Like I explained in my preview, the gameplay of Picross 3D: Round 2 is fairly simple. Each puzzle in the game gives you a set amount of rows that consists out of small, white cubes. One side of some of these rows have numbers displayed. These numbers tell you how many cubes in this specific row have to be colored. It is up to you to find out which cubes have to be colored and which you have to remove. Once you’ve completely painted the necessary cubes, the puzzle transforms into an object. These objects are themed around a certain subject, for example, the color red or sound. This may sound exactly the same as the gameplay of the original Picross 3D, but that is not the case. Round 2 gives you two colors to use, instead of one. The blue paint simply colors a cube blue, while the orange paint colors a cube orange but also transforms the shape of that cube. The addition of a second color makes the puzzles more challenging and requires more thought, especially the more difficult ones that you’ll unlock after the first few hours.
Each puzzle in Picross 3D: Round 2 is carefully designed and increases slowly but steadily in difficulty. They also don’t take that much time to solve, which encourages playing multiple puzzles after each other instead of wasting your time on one that is overly complicated. My biggest worry after playing the preview was that the puzzles were fairly easy to solve, and thus not that satisfying. Luckily, the full game offers you difficult puzzles to complete, especially near the end of the game. If those puzzles are still not challenging enough, you can then also increase the difficulty. Solving a puzzle on the highest difficulty will also reward you with more points and a medal. Collecting points and medals is necessary to unlock new puzzles for you to solve, so players who only solve puzzles on the easiest setting will miss out on quite a lot of the game.
Like the picture above shows, there are also time trials to play. In these puzzles, you simply have to solve a puzzle in a set amount of time. The quicker you are and fewer mistakes you make while solving the puzzle, the more minutes get added to the timer. This may sound simple to do, but rushing through the puzzle will result in making a lot of mistakes, which in turn results in a lower score. It’s obvious that the best way to play this game is with a steady hand and a focused mind in order to get the highest score.
Amiibo support
I already wrote in the preview that this game also has Amiibo support. Scanning an Amiibo unlocks a unique puzzle that is themed around that Amiibo. For example, below you see the puzzle that is unlocked by scanning the Link Amiibo. What I didn’t know at the time of writing the preview was that only some Amiibo are supported. You can view the compatible Amiibo on the website of Picross 3D. This is a bit disappointing since supporting every Amiibo would have expanded the lifetime of the game. It’s still a pretty neat addition, but it could have been much better.
One nitpick
There is one issue that I have to mention if only to be able to say one negative thing about this game. The background music quickly gets repetitive and eventually annoying. It features a few tracks that are constantly repeating and only change when you choose a different puzzle. I quickly found myself shutting off the sound just because it was so annoying to constantly hear the same tracks over and over again. Not that big of an issue, but worth mentioning.
Conclusion
Picross 3D: Round 2 is an excellent puzzle game, it’s simple as that. It’s filled with puzzles to solve and the addition of a second color is a welcome one. If you have a 3DS and like puzzle games, then this game deserves your attention.
9/10
Tested on Nintendo 3DS
