Pixel Puzzles Ultimate

The Good
Pixel Puzzles Ultimate is free to play and try. It has six puzzle packs free and dozens more for purchase. The presentation and general feel were very good on first impression. Not only has lots of great quality puzzles, it also has themes to play, with different graphics, animations, sounds and ambience. The visuals are the strong point in this game.

The pieces can be quite tricky, not at all like the usual traditional real life jigsaw puzzles; that adds up to the fun factor, with double or triple joints, spiral joints, and fantasy shapes.

The game also has some achievements to get, and from time to time you get tokens you can exchange for clues for piece angles, positions, etc.

The game board interacts with the pieces with sounds or animations when dropping the pieces, and there are five drawers to store classified pieces.

The Bad
The game looked as if it promised the ultimate jigsaw challenge for the jigsaw lover, but other than the graphics and the amount of puzzle packs (although I only tried the free ones; I only saw pics of the purchasable ones), it failed to impress me in the gameplay area.

First of all, you have to place the piece in the right place of the board for it to 'fix'. You can't join two pieces, even if you know they go together, until you find the right place for them in the board. That was the first big put-off with this game, and probably the biggest one.

That means you can't start doing groups of pieces and then try to fit them in the broader scheme. Also, you can't move several pieces at once, and you can only rotate pieces while dragging them. These two limitations were bad but I still wanted to give the game a chance.

The drawers for classification are quite small. They don't expand, so they are just droppers for piles of pieces. The lose pieces area, where you would do also part of the play/classification, is not saved between sessions. That means that everything which is not in the board (in the right place or not), or on the drawers, gets shuffled each time you reload the puzzle.

Also, each puzzle has a set number of pieces, and piece shapes. That means you can't make the same puzzle with more pieces, nor redo the puzzle with other piece joint style. And of course you can't use your own pictures for puzzles, you have to purchase the DLCs which add up to more than $100 - which, no matter the amount of puzzles they contain, is quite a lot for a game.

All these lack of features I've found in other jigsaw puzzles make Pixel Puzzles Ultimate very weak for more than sporadic casual gaming. They are limitations which come in the way for long-term play, or hardcore jigsawing with large amounts of pieces. I've done thousand pieces and more with e.g. Jigsaws Galore (old but still among the best in gameplay terms), but a less than 200 piece one was kind of painful. I'd rather make one of my real 5k ones than replay Pixel Puzzles Ultimate, which I'm uninstalling as soon as I finish this review.

I still played a bit more after finding all these shortcomings, but playing was uncomfortable and frustrating, and in the middle of the second puzzle I had to stop to come and write a review.

The Bottom Line
Graphically impressive with lots of puzzle packs if you can afford them, but not for mid to serious jigsaw players. Even casual players might find many other options. Enhancing the gameplay area could make it one of the top jigsaw games, but as it's now it's just a gorgeous-looking bad attempt.

If the developers would have spent more time developing the gameplay, piece interaction, and jigsaw making for replay value, instead of thinking how to squeeze money from players, I'm sure it could have compared more favorably to other jigsaw puzzles.

My conclusion: find some other jigsaw game with better gameplay.