My 3DS picross itch was not scratched when I beat the Zelda one back in like January. After 10 months or so of playing the training modes EVERY day and spending 4 bucks on 800 points in-game to unlock stuff, I have FINALLY beaten the last puzzle in this game.

It's a picross game, and it's a fine one, but the F2P parts are really what make or break it as far as I see it. The main Pokemon aspect to this is that you can bring a team of the Pokemon you "catch" (i.e. solved their puzzle) into a puzzle and can use a special power that that type of Pokemon has to make the puzzle easier (trips a certain pattern of blocks, freezes the clock, highlights hints). Each puzzle also has missions you can achieve during them to win points that you can use to unlock more areas (out of 30), expand the number of Pokemon you can take on a mission, or extend your recharge timer (you can place one new block of puzzle every minute after you start depleting the number of your default 200).

The powers and missions often meet as you need to use a certain power to complete a certain mission in a level, but that means to get the points for that you HAVE to make it easier, even if you just wanna play it like a normal picross puzzle. That on top of the absolutely GLACIAL pace of unlocking more areas (it's usually about 10-14 days of playing the training mode as your only interaction with the game) that make it a bit of a hard sell as a F2P game. It's fine if you wanted to just pay for the stuff, and that also means you don't need to care about the missions as the points they earn you are meaningless as you've effectively already unlocked everything.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. A bit too slow-paced for a F2P game, but it is technically entirely completable free. It's a neat distraction, but your money would probably be better spent on something like 3D Picross Round 2, which also has several hundred puzzles and in the neat 3D spin-off of picross :3

Pokemon Picross is a pretty damn good picross game. That's to be expected, given that it was created by the pic masters Jupiter Corporation, developers of the Mario's Picross and Picross DS games. Unfortunately it's really difficult to recommend.

For starters, you can't play it any more. Well not legally at least. With the shutting down of the 3DS eshop, Pokemon Picross has been reduced to abandonware. That wouldn't be so bad given it's original free-to-play status, but unfortunately this game has one of the more baffling freemium models I've ever seen. You need currency to unlock more levels, but the amounts you require dwarf the total you can make a day. Soon you need 100 or more picrites to unlock the next area, whilst the most you can generate per day is ten. Ten. So it can take a week and a half to unlock a new area if you've beaten all the available missions. The answer is simple then, just buy more picrites, right?

Wrong. First, the eshop is down, so you cannot get any more picrites without the use of a cheat engine, which requires a hacked 3DS (which I definitely didn't use, Nintendo, cough cough). Should you purchase enough picrites though, you'll find that the shop will now give you an infinite amount of them to you, for free, at any time. So essentially, you just buy enough microtransactions that the game is now actually completely free, which is basically just like buying a game?

It's really, really odd. I'm still baffled why they aren't more explicit about the paywall. After the first three or five areas, just put up a prompt that says "Hey! You completed the tutorial/prologue, please give us a tenner to play more!" Other free games do this all the time, particularly back in 2015. Just Gamefreak being really weird I guess, but it still confuses me to this day.

Oh yeah! The game! How is it? It's... Well, it's picross. With Pokemon! At first, the pokemon seem like a really cool addition. You can take up to five into a level with you, an each type has a different kind of ability. Certain pokemon only work on levels up to a maximum size, and their abilities vary in effectiveness. The better 'mon come with a bigger cooldown, but by the later stages, you have literally hundreds of the blighters, so it becomes laughably easy to just spam the abilities and dissolve the difficulty curve completely. Perhaps relegating some of the critters to a support status, maybe enhancing earlier pokemon rather than being separate would have fixed this problem.

The missions are also lacking. Bonus objectives on each level, their rewards are trifling, at most six picrites if you get all four in one go. If you've made it as far as the thirtieth area, it stands to reason you don't need any more picrites because you've almost certainly paid for the game, so they exist for the sake of completion alone. And there are far, far too many levels to care about star ratings. Especially when halfway through it's revealed that every single level has an alt version, with a more difficult hint system. Given that just playing through every level and occasionally going back took over 25 hours (and I'm quite good at picross at this point), I don't see much point in redoing every single level again.

Perhaps I'm overthinking what is a fairly throwaway concept. "What if Pokemon but also picross?" is a fun idea and it's executed reasonably well here. The creature collecting is an interesting twist on an ancient puzzle formula, but its overstuffed with samey levels, an inverted difficulty curve and a laughably bad freemium model. There are better picross games and better Pokemon spinoffs, but its adequate if you've already played those.

In one word, "yikes." It is very evident that this was just a continuation of Nintendo's toe dips in the waters of mobile like experiences. But Pokémon Picross is genuinely a bad game. I mean, I love Picross, and the puzzles are pretty good; but the microtransactions just complexly ruin every ounce of enjoyability. I can not play for more then 20 minute's before being forced to pay money, or just leave the game and play something better. Do not recommend, unless you do mod the game to remove the transactions as someone else mentioned in a previous review. ( @AcesAces )