+ The gameplay adds layers as you go up each level and keeps things fresh by changing it up
+ Some special challenges are fun
- Too many conflicting obstacles and objectives make later levels frustrating
- The number of turns given for completion/time limits consistently runs stressfully short
- The menus have weird scrolling interfaces because it's a mobile port
- The dictionary is missing random words
[b]Words according to this game's dictionary:[/b] Ess, Dee, gaes, chang, rased, bos, sorb, mog, zoa, kir, mim, perea, noo
[b]Not a word:[/b] Asians
Welcome to Highrise Heroes, a game about trying to guide a bunch of little character avatars down to the bottom of the screen by linking together words to make the letter tiles in their way disappear. Except your characters need to be regularly linked to oxygen tiles or they suffocate. Also there are metal blocks in the way. And bombs. And a turn limit. And everything is on fire.
This game is not a relaxing, casual word game. The first few levels set you up for success and fun, but by Level 4 or so you'll be consistently needing to reset your game after just barely not managing to do whatever it is the game is asking of you.
You may chuckle to yourself that you, a veritable Boggle champion, will have no issues finishing the game. You're great at finding long, elegant words on the board! To which I'd have to point out that you're never allowed to just make whatever words you see in this game. I lost plenty of games where I laid down whoppers like QUEERER or TREATISE. There's always a turn limitation, and even if you see a long, juicy word, you're discouraged from just going for it unless it's helping you manage all the many, many fiddly things each level asks you to keep track of. Every move needs to be considered, and if you're like me, that takes some of the fun out of the actual word-spotting.
One of my least favourite gimmicks were the "bomb" letters that randomly generate across the board. They need to be disposed of within a certain number of turns, or else game over. The game can and will throw more bombs at you than you can dispose of in time unless you use multiple bomb letters in a single word, and yes, this does use up your limited number of turns while the characters also languish from lack of oxygen and whatever else is going on in that level.
As an example of how annoying this becomes, there are levels where you need to use specific golden tiles in every word, of which there are only 1-4 on the board. Bombs will show up there, too, in places completely inaccessible to your gold tiles, upon which your only choice is to then sigh and hit that retry button. And that's just two of the mechanics that get introduced.
Even the word-finding itself is hampered by an incredibly weird dictionary that will recognize words so rare they're essentially random combinations of vowels, but not commonplace ones like DOX or PHO. Often I chained random things together to see if they'd work, which sort of defeats the purpose of a word game in the first place.
Each level has clearly been thoughtfully designed with specific challenges in mind, so it's a shame that the game will sometimes simply present you with an unwinnable version of them. It's entirely up to the RNG gods which letters they feel like giving you, and overall I found the sheer number of things you have to try to micromanage each level more frustrating than fun. There was nothing worse than narrowly shooing the last of my vulnerable little character tiles through the bottom of the screen to safety, with just one turn left, having finally managed to break down the rock blocks in my way and controlled the fire and distributed oxygen properly and navigated the conveyor belts—only for the game to tell me I failed anyways because I was under the required number of points to proceed. Agony.
Theoretically, your characters provide superpowers you can use to help complete the levels more easily, but while you are forced to rely on them at times, they drain your number of remaining turns, so you're discouraged from actually using them. There were some powers I never even touched. You're also limited by whichever characters you have on that specific level, since they each have a different ability and will frequently separate from each other as the plot demands. It would have been way better to have a separate mechanic for powers. Perhaps a meter that gets charged up if you make words of a certain length, or even just a set number you can use each level.
One final word about the game's story, since it's received praise in other reviews: it's somewhat more detailed than the usual for a puzzle-y mobile adaptation like this, but it's really nothing to write home about. It was a pleasant way to give each of the little character tiles meaning during the gameplay, but the dialogue and writing are juvenile, and the one twist is broadcast so blatantly it would be almost impossible to miss it. So if you were considering buying it for the story but you aren't sure about the gameplay, give it a pass.
TL;DR: While there are some fun ideas packed in here, the game is unnecessarily hard, with no accessibility options and a mediocre story. I [i]almost[/i] had fun with it, so if you're looking for a challenge rather than relaxation and don't mind having to restart the same level repeatedly, this might still be for you.
Personally, it made me crave a normal game of Boggle.
