I loved this app and tolerated the sizable volume of ads for a while, as it was an enjoyable enough puzzle to put up with it. But over the last two weeks there’s now a ridiculous lag between me typing the letter and it showing up. So much so that I often think I just didn’t actually type the letter, so I hit it again, just to be told I got the next one wrong because it typed it twice. It’s unplayable like this. I keep checking to see if it resolves, but two weeks and it hasn’t changed. For what it’s worth, I tried adjusting settings on my phone to stop background apps from running, rebooted, checked for updates in the iOS and the app itself, and looked for any signs of this occurring in any other app, and nope. Nothing improves it, and it’s only this app having this problem. So unless it gets fixed, in which case I will amend my review, I can only give the app 2 stars.

Cryptogram is a fun challenging puzzle game that I spend a lot more time than I should on. The messages they give you after you've completed it are either very nice quotes, references, or sometimes a joke. The events and tournaments are a fun detail as well. The only thing that ruins it for me are the absolutely appalling, inappropriate and clickbaited ads. After every puzzle there's an ad and before starting a new one there's an ad. The only way you can revive after three mistakes (which is a little bit too little, I make typos so the mistakes are annoying), would be having to watch an ad. The price for taking away the ads isn't too much however I personally don't think it's a good idea to invest money in a mobile game. If the ads were a little less, or if they weren't gross and sexist, then I think it would be manageable. There isn't as many ads as there is in other games thankfully. This is a great puzzle game that actually makes you use your brain, however the ads are killing off my braincells.

I like cryptograms and this game delivers some interesting ones. It has some fun gameplay by giving you a few letters here and there, and locking out other letters. The ads are not terribly disruptive. The design is good, decent aesthetics, fun, events and challenges. Unfortunately, there is a very important function missing. When you guess a letter correctly, I think the player should have the option to automatically fill in the rest of the matching letter spaces. It is frustrating, boring, and takes away from the enjoyment of the game to have to hunt down every single number-letter match that you guessed correctly and manually enter a letter. I guess this drives more ad revenue because if you are off by a single space, you get a life taken away even though you didn’t make an incorrect guess. It’s really frustrating, enough to get me to stop playing the game. I hope, the designers are listening to the feedback.