Continuing onward from our last week’s look at Puzzle Games on the App Store, we’re going to take a look at Word Puzzles on the App Store. Word Puzzles have long been popular, making appearances in newspapers, children’s fun books, magazines and now they’ve paved their way onto the App Store.
WordsWorth
WordsWorth comes from a team of Indian creative minds called 99Games Online. Based out of Mangalore, India, [Milind: hey! That’s my native land!] 99Games has a bunch of puzzle games available in the App Store, WordsWorth being their latest offering. But, what exactly is WordsWorth?
WordsWorth is a fun, interactive word puzzle game wherein the objective of the game is to find words from a collection of letters scrambled in the form of a honeycomb looking grid. Although this sounds simple, it is quite difficult to find out and trace the words from the grid. You may either tap each alphabet to form a chain forming the word, or you can trace out the word chain by dragging the path. You are awarded points based on the length of the word and the alphabets chosen. The top of the game tells you how much a word formation will reward you before the submitting.
To make things more interesting, the game offers quite a few twists, making the game even more addictive. Special tiles show up in the grid, each with some special ability or reason. ‘Buzzwords’ show up at the bottom of the game screen, and if you are rewarded with a hefty bonus if you find the buzzword hidden in the grid. Timed Tiles are indicated by the color red and should be eliminated before the timer runs out. Green tiles that show up are used to increase the score while Gold tiles are awarded if you create a word containing 2 letters more than the minimum word size selected. The game even has wildcard tiles that can be used as any alphabet. If you still cannot find words in the grid, a simple shake of the phone will reshuffle the letters in the grid at the expense of one timed tile. Of course, there is a limit to the number of times you can reshuffle. If the above is too confusing, it has been well explained in the game’s help screen.
Although the game is quite interesting, the in-game music that plays in the background is quite annoying. Sure, the Settings have an option to turn it off, but that even turns of the Music effects. I want the music effects, but not the annoying stream of music. The game stores your high scores in a ‘Wall of Wow’, but I’d love if the game had a universal wall where my score would be compared with all the global players.
WordsWorth’s Gameplay is fun, intelligently difficult, yet interesting and makes you rack your brains and exercise those unused brain cells. If you’re one with a sub-par vocabulary like me, the game may tend to get monotonous after a certain period, but don’t give up. WordsWorth is available for $0.99 in the App Store [iTunes Link], with a Lite Edition for those who want to try it out first.
