Microsoft Jigsaw

Fun but bogged down by glitches

Microsoft Jigsaw is a fun game overall, but it's plagued by glitches. Far too often did I spend 30-40 minutes trying to finish a single daily challenge only for the game to crash just after I succeeded, failing to register my win and requiring me to start from scratch. The ads also mess the game up, as the entire program will often freeze just as you're moving your cursor around. Sometimes this only causes you to lose precious seconds (and that clock does indeed keep ticking even if the numbers are frozen), but other times, it will cause a click you made in one area of the board to register in a totally different area of the board, ruining your score chain and spoiling your chances of a win.

Glitches aside, what you see is what you get with Jigsaw. It's... jugsaw puzzles. Many of them are very beautiful pictures, so it can be a lot of fun to peacefully plop pieces into place and steadily build another visually impressive piece. But if jigsaws aren't your thing, this game won't be either. The daily challenges do introduce a bit of variety, but these are often very short by design, limiting how much variety you can really mix in.

As with many other MS Casual Games, daily challenge medals are present, requiring quite the grind. While they were certainly designed to take a full year (as one achievement requires 12 bronze medals, of which you can only earn one per month), they can be done in a matter of 1-2 months or less if you're dedicated) by changing the system clock. Of course this dramatically cuts down on how long it will take you to finish the achievements, but even then, it takes a LOT of jigsaw puzzles to rack up 8 gold medals (which are the coin equivalent of 3 bronze medals each).

All in all, while the glitches were frustrating and the medal grind is never fun, I have no regrets downloading MS Jigsaw and grinding it out to completion. Definitely recommended if you enjoy lazily completing puzzles.