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Obviously there is at least one staff member at 8 Floor Games who is a cat owner to explain yet another entry in the company's Cute Cats series of jigsaw offerings.  1001 Jigsaw Cute Cats 3 is the latest title to arrive from 8 Floor Games.  As with the other titles in this 1001 series, you are presented with 500 images of felines doing their best to captivate their audience with their antics and cuteness.

While various adjustable options are supplied with this title, the choice of colours used to handle this feature could have been handled better.  There was more than an instance when I struggled to read the type of feature choice that was available during the set-up procedure.  This was entirely due to the pairing of a background colour that was rather similar to that of the text used to announce the feature.  Eventually, using the "suck it and see" approached I was able to work out the correct way to add  another player's profile and choose from the available resolutions.  A little surprisingly the software does give you the chance to select a colour for the workspace but this hardly makes up for the struggle with the set-up interface.

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Forget the 1001 reference, the subject matter covered through this series is limited to 500 images.  These images are divided into five books or photo albums.  You can flick through these books as you view the choice of images displayed four-to-a-page.  Rather than give each image a name or even a reference to the breed of cat displayed, you are shown the number of pieces that make up the puzzle.  The number of pieces varies between 12 and 252 with the greater majority of the images being in landscape rather than portrait orientation.  There will also be an icon to indicate whether the puzzle pieces might need rotated to be correctly positioned.

Running across the bottom of the screen, when viewing the images in one of the books, will be a series of icons giving access to certain features.  You can view trophies awarded for performance or the op scores achieved by different players.  Other icons let you modify the attributes of an image or recreate the jigsaw puzzle.  When modifying the attributes of an image, you can lower or raise the number of pieces and adjust the cut of the angle used to create the pieces plus opt to reject or include the rotation facility.

When selecting to solve the jigsaw of the chosen image, the available icons representing tools, will change considerably as different types of assistance is provided.  You can opt to display a large thumbnail or ghost image of the chosen cat on which to work when positioning the pieces.  A magnifying glass is available to check on small details and a hint option will suggest where to place a piece. 

My favourite tool is the one that quickly removes all the central pieces, allowing you to concentrate on putting together the jigsaw's border.  Once this has been achieved then the inner pieces are brought back into action so the puzzle can be completed.  Less useful were the sort option and pocket facility, located in the top left corner, to temporary store pieces, which I rarely used.

If you like jigsaws and cats then this title can be downloaded from Gamehouse.com where it is priced at $9.99. It is also available from Big Fish Games priced at £8.22.  The game requires a 1.0 GHz processor with 512MB of RAM running Windows 7 and later.

1001 Jigsaw Cute Cats 3 | GameHouse

1001 Jigsaw Cute Cats 3 | Big Fish