Word Wise

[b]word wise[/b] is a pretty good endless word game, not unlike [b]bookworm deluxe[/b] and its ilk. after creating a world that acts as a profile, you're faced with a screenful of letters, and you have to create hopefully valid words of at least 3 letters by selecting them in any direction. each tile has a point value and some contain two letters, which is a small deviation from the norm. [b]the game is controlled with the mouse[/b], simple hold and drag, you can deselect tiles and back out of creating a valid word by right clicking while left is still pressed, otherwise just let go. it'd be better if the current word started showing on top immediately, not only after 3 tiles, which should be 3 letters anyway, but double-letter tiles still only count as one in this case. it should be fixed at some point and I'll edit the review if/when it happens. double click marks tiles, perhaps to be used later for a longer word once they're in the right place, mouse wheel zooms in/out, right or middle click pans. I didn't find it necessary in full screen in 1080p, but it might come in handy under other circumstances. there are [b]6 special tiles[/b] besides the basic wood ones: bronze, silver, gold and diamond are word multipliers (between 2 and 5), bombs can't be selected but will explode if a word is created next to them and the values of destroyed tiles will get added to the word score. they leave behind burned tiles that aren't only worthless on their own, but also decrease word value to zero, plus they can spread around. these special tiles appear very rarely and randomly among new letters, or when you make especially high-scoring words (50 for bronze, 500 for diamond, 1000 for bombs), but they can spawn over other special tiles as well, potentially turning a precious diamond into a measly bronze. [b]the dictionary is enormous and can be edited[/b] to recognize more words or to get rid of some. there's even an extra button to quickly remove common nsfw words (so the fun ones) and a word checker to see if the word you're about to create is valid or not. the [i]how to play[/i] section is a bit too wordy (I should know with my walls of text) and various stats are tracked per world, such as score, level that goes up after every 1000 tiles, number of words created, longest word, etc. there's [b]endless shuffle and a limited amount of 'rejuvenation'[/b] to replace every tile on the board. you start with 5 and get 2 more after every level-up. not much else to say about the gameplay, it's fine, it works, but [b]the leveling system is entirely pointless[/b]. it doesn't matter if you're at level 1 or 21, the only difference is you might have more re-rolls that you're never hard-pressed to use anyway, so they might as well be provided in endless quantities too. and sure, levels indicate progress, but so does your score, so why have two things measure essentially the same thing? not to mention using 1000 tiles to go up a level is really excessive. it's like watching grass grow, and since that's the only thing that counts, [b]it doesn't matter if your 10-letter word is worth 200 or 50k points[/b], as it'll still only count as 10 tiles out of 1000. the numbers in the corner show score, number of words and current level, but the latter could be replaced with number of tiles and the arbitrary level thing could be scrapped entirely. settings are accessible from the main menu and while playing. [b]windowed mode has a resizable window, but size isn't saved[/b], going back to full screen, then windowed again, or restarting the game resets it to the default, which is way too small. it's another thing that might get fixed at some point. then there are extensive audio settings, including separate volume sliders for various parts of the game, the ability to toggle all 5 featured genres (some songs even have vocals), and pause or skip the current track. [b]the music itself is pretty good and there's lots of it[/b] (7+ hours, apparently), but with such a big emphasis on audio, playlists should've been included as well, adding and removing songs, playing any of them on request, and [b]pause/skip should be part of the ui[/b], not hidden in some menus. graphics are fine too, but some customization would be nice, different tilesets, more backgrounds. there are a few more annoyances, namely an [b]always unnecessary splash screen[/b], 'press spacebar' on a black screen, really elegant. it appears every single time and mouse doesn't work even though the entire game is controlled with it. then there's the cumbersome exit confirmation, making you [b]click THREE buttons before letting you leave[/b]. both are ridiculous, might as well press alt+f4 in the menu and skip the captcha ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. as usual, one dev's idea of 'fun' is many players' annoyance. luckily, the game itself is free of such shenanigans, it just leaves a bad first and last impression. other than these, it's nice enough with a good amount of functionality (especially if some issues get fixed down the road) and potential longevity, but [b]only if you're fine with endlessly creating words for your own amusement[/b]. the price is reasonable as well, though a somewhat lesser version is available on mobile for free.

Very chill, low pressure game. The kind of thing that's fun and easy to mess around with while watching YouTube, listening to a podcast or whatever.

Fun game a little strange on exiting

I really love this, like scrabble or word searches but with fun twists, laid back and relaxing game. Use the app on my phone as well, very calming, 100% recommend for people who like word games.

A word version of a match 3 game. Spell out a word of three or more letters, the blocks disappear and more fall in from the top. Sometimes you'll get a multiplier letter that boosts your score, sometimes you'll get a bomb that blows up half the grid. Sometimes the letters catch fire and become worthless, but you have to use them or the fire spreads. So far, so very average. Why don't I recommend it then? First, the word list - it is extremely lenient with what it counts as a word. Foreign words, proper names, slang and abbreviations - some things that just seem to be strings of letters. But against that, it doesn't accept some reasonably common words. You can edit the dictionary, but that would take forever. Next is the game itself. The distribution of letters seems to be off from what I'd expect. Qs and Zs seem to be as common as Ls and Ps. And you quickly end up with big patches of vowels and areas of consonants that you can't use. But that's OK, because you can reshuffle the board as often as you want, without penalty. The game falls into an odd kind of zone where it's both too easy and too hard at the same time. The scoring doesn't seem very balanced either. You need to score 50 points to get the bonus tiles, but this is quite tricky to achieve. Q is worth 20, but it's hard to finesse the board to get the right letters into sequence. Once you've got a bonus though, it gets relatively easy to get more and more into play. Again, too hard and too easy at the same time. Overall, I found it too fiddly and fussy to be a fun distraction, but not challenging enough to be a worth playing as a game in itself. If the devs tweak the scoring and such, I'd be happy to revisit this, but for the moment, I'm going to be uninstalling it.

A relaxing game. Very good for casual play. The interface is ok, but is a little weird. Can't ask much more for the price.

Good value (I paid £0.40, in sale). A nice, relaxing word game. Good for calming you down after a stressful day. sometimes, an easy yet mildly challenging game that doesn't arouse adrenalin is just what is needed. This game can suit people of almost all levels of IQ. The graphics are nice, My score rose a lot faster when I realised that this game is very forgiving in what it considers a word. For example, proper nouns, abbreviations even non-English are often accepted. It accepts hundreds of 3-letter words that I never knew existed! It would be nice if the devs could come up with some ideas to make this game a tad more interesting.

this game is endless and with no apparent techniques of motivating the player to keep going. awful.

It's fun, but the animations are long and there's no option to speed them up

I'm sorry to say that this game is pretty terrible. The way to start a game is unintuitive and just checking the rules requires the player to scroll through a long page of text. What's worse, the game accepts pretty much any string of three letters as a valid word, so it does nothing to teach reading or spelling. I was looking for an educational game to share, but I can't recommend this.