Carol Vorderman's Sudoku Review - PC

Most Sudoku fans need not look any farther than their morning paper, or perhaps one of those magazine stand digests for their Japanese number grid fix. After all, what is Sudoku but a simple yet addictive number puzzle thingy that’s taken the non-Japanese world by storm the last couple years. And only one Western personality has risen above the teeming masses of nerds to claim her crown as the queen of Sudoku. Carol Vorderman. Yes, that Carol Vorderman.

Who?

For non anglophiles who needed to look her up on Wikipedia (including yours truly), Carol Vorderman is a British TV presenter best known for appearing on quiz shows like the long-running Countdown. So she’s sort of like a female Alex Trebek. Or perhaps a smarter Vanna White (pffft, like that’s even possible). But apparently the fetching and slightly cougar-esque Carol is an enormous fan of the sudoku, having published several best selling books on the subject, therefore she gets to have her own eponymously titled videogame. She might just be the new John Madden, sans clogged arteries.

So what does Carol contribute to the game? Well, aside from some heavily airbrushed pics of herself on the box cover and occasional loading screen, not that much. She hosts a couple of unhelpful tutorial videos (in a drab black pantsuit; c’mon pretty lady, show us the goods!) that you can watch if you’ve never played sudoku or are a total retard.

You see, sudoku is simple. You’ve got a nine by nine grid where each horizontal and vertical line must include the digits one through nine, each appearing once. In addition, each three by three grid that the larger grid is made up of will also contain each of the nine numerals. Sudoku, is therefore easy to learn but difficult to master.

Break out your pencils

Since there’s plenty of sudoku books out there and most daily newspapers stick one next to the crossword, the question is begged, why do you need a digital version. Well, this one does offer a lot of nice game types for you to fool around with, mainly relying on different difficulty levels and time limits. And interface-wise, Carol Vorderman’s Sudoku does a good job of making the game easy to control and manage, even giving you the ability to “pencil in” answers to help you figure out tougher puzzles.

But in the end, it’s just freaking sudoku. And the inclusion of one MILF-ish brit doesn’t go a long way towards making the whole package more attractive. Maybe if you could strip her down to her granny-panties with each correct… um, no actually. That image just made us a little queasy. Keep the pantsuit on Carol, and next time leave the puzzles to the pencil and paper set. Thanks.

Article by: Tom Price
Video produced by: Guy Branum