Review: Word Puzzle (XBLA)
Word Puzzle is the next game in a long series of XBLA titles that no one is really going to care about. What is the reason for this mediocrity? I'd say Lazy presentation, lack of any compelling game play and incredibly generic title would probably be a good place to start. The concept is simple: you are in some sort of South American jungle looking at Mayan (Aztec?) ruins and you have to solve word puzzles. It's your generic word find, where a list is given to you, and you must find the word on a field of letters, whether it be printed backwards (crazy!), forwards (too easy!) or diagonal (indigestion!). If Word Puzzle had JUST this formula, maybe it would be a tolerable game, but since it's on Xbox Live Arcade it supposedly has to be extreme and give you a horrendous 3d puzzle board to work with. You have your standard viewing area like in any puzzle video game, but inside this area is an even smaller area that moves at slight angles to give the effect of 3d. It doesn't add anything to the game, and in fact makes it incredibly less efficient than if they decided to not fancy anything up. The camera sometimes takes too long to catch up with your cursor, which is frustrating for a time-based game.
Don't worry too much about losing, though. Because you won't. The game is hand-holding at its worst with the first letter of a word highlighted on the board already for you. It's impossible to notice unless you were trying to lose on purpose. Which I did because I got so bored I didn't want to play any more. There is seemingly no goal to Word Puzzle, I could hardly tell if I had completed the tutorial or not. There's no level structure or numbering system, you just play and find words until you don't. How long or how short that time period is up to you.
Most of this game just feels like a half-assed attempt at getting good-intentioned people to download a crappy game by mistake. The word sets don't even provide anything compelling besides finding weird and slightly offensive words that seemed to have slipped through the quality control cracks. In my first game, I got the words "schmeg" and "jewfish". Seriously. One of these is disgusting and the other feels slightly racist. Either way I wrote a letter to my congressman. I am highly offended. The next game I got "underrotated" and "futz". I refuse to believe that those are actual words, and therefore I refuse to find them. And if I wasn't already offended by the word selection (using "NYC" as a word is a crime in of itself) the music won the "most annoying music in a video game ever" award, with its inspirational and sweeping Lion King-esque score. I imagine writing a soundtrack for a puzzle game is a challenge; you have to write something that won't make people stab themselves in the face after hearing your song twenty times over. The person who scored Word Puzzle failed, and now has blood on his hands.
Worthiness? There is none. If your grandma has an Xbox 360 and you are somehow trying to get her brain stimulated again after a coma, maybe Word Puzzle would be good for that. Maybe you could coordinate some sort of odd prank on a friend by downloading Word Puzzle to his account and getting all the achievements for him, just to have that mar up their Gamercard. Who knows, man. I don't recommend it, not by a long shot.
Jewfish? Seriously?
Score: 1/5 Skip it!
What say you?!