The main meat of the game is, of course, the crosswords mode, and it’s here where most of the problems lie. The puzzles are split into three levels of difficulty, with an extra set of bonus puzzles available later. Easy and Normal are both available to begin with, but to gain hard mode a full one hundred puzzles must be cleared on normal mode first - an astonishing design decision, considering the time investment that this requires. Any experienced crossword solver will find the quest to unlock puzzles nearer their skill level mind-numbing, with the clues on normal mode rarely harder than those on Easy.

Worse still, the 1000 puzzles on offer aren’t of a high quality and lack any of the style you’d expect from a human-designed puzzle. Words are thrown haphazardly anywhere they can go, which results in absurd clues like “AAA, BBB, _ _ _” just so that it can be crammed in there, and that clue will be encountered a lot. Indeed, while there are many puzzles for teeth to be sunk into, there aren’t nearly enough clues for them. Clues are repeated over and over and over again, and a point is reached where almost every answer in the game can be reached through simply remembering what it was the last twelve times, rather than any crossword-based skill.

The layout is one area in which the crosswords game is adequate enough. The DS is held like a book with a zoom-able view of the puzzle on the touch screen and the clues appearing on the other, along with a scrolling view of the puzzle. Tapping any square in the crossword shows both clues associated with it and tapping it again zooms the puzzle in so that an answer can be written. Inputting letters is fiddly, however. After selecting across or down and zooming in, a letter is written. After a short pause, this will be converted into the game's best guess, and then the game moves to the next square in the clue, or the zoom out button can be hit to move to the next clue.

Text recognition is another area in which problems arise. For the most part it works well, but there are certain letters that it gets wrong far too often. 'L' and 'I' are the two main culprits, but 'E' is often mistaken for 'F' or 'T', 'U' for 'V', 'G' for anything at all. It doesn’t take long to adjust your handwriting to what the game expects, but with a clock ticking away all the time you’re encouraged to write quickly, which only promotes more errors.

Added to this mix is the most pointless ranking system in videogame history. Performing very well on a crossword will see you awarded the coveted 'A+' rank. Take slightly longer, though, and the shame of an 'A+' rank will greet you on completion. That’s nothing compared with the utter embarrassment you’re faced with if you spend over an hour solving a puzzle with just four, four-letter clues in it: 'A+'; you’ll never be able to show your face in public again. There’s very little incentive in trying to improve the best time on a puzzle; a trick missed.

With crosswords falling way short, it relies on the other modes to rescue the package. Word searches fare much better and work perfectly on the touch screen, for a time. The touch screen holds the word search, with themed clues appearing on the other. Dragging the stylus happily from one end of a word to the other crosses the clue off and then, well, you find the next one. It’s a word search mode with no frills. Later, though, puzzles become too big for the touch screen and so the puzzle must be scrolled around constantly. With a puzzle such as a word search where ideally the entire grid needs to be visible at once this does not work, scanning for words is far too awkward.

The final mode is the Anagrams mode, in which six letters must be arranged to make as many other words as possible. For convenience, an alphabetical list is provided with gaps appearing where a word hasn’t been found yet, and it's this that ruins the mode entirely. The challenge is to find all of the words and the player soon descends into trying every combination of letters until a word is stumbled upon. By the time all the words have been found there’s no sense of achievement left, because it was all just trial and error. A challenge to find as many as possible and have a rank awarded based on performance would have been better suited to a game of this sort. Even this would have been difficult, though, with the game using a dictionary all of its own making, with some obvious words thrown out despite being in everyday use.

In the end, the sum is barely as good as its parts. It may function well as 'My First Crossword Puzzles' for the under tens, but, despite the huge amount of content, there’s little here worth playing. Any serious puzzler would be strongly advised to look elsewhere for their fix.