Word Puzzles – Full Review

Those of you who love word puzzles and word searches will find Lightwood Games Word Puzzles POWGI worth a look. It has been released for both the 3DS and the Wii U. Its developer Lightwood games have previously done well on the iOS (iPhone/iPad) market, with their title Word Search Party being downloaded nearly two million times on iOS since April 5^th 2015.

Word Puzzles can seem very similar to the huge range of crossword and puzzle games that were released on the original DS .The 3DS has a lot less of them by comparison.

Word Puzzles logo

World Puzzles has 6 modes. These are ; Word Maze, Mixups, One Word, Flowers, Circles and, lastly, Crossovers. There are 480 puzzles in total so you will have plenty to puzzles to play through. In addition the puzzles contain variety. Examples of which is Word Maze in which you find the words by joining them up one after another like a wiggly line with your stylus. Another is One Word, which feels like Lightwood’s Word Search released last year and requires you to fill in words from famous quotes from celebrities and historical figures.

There is amiibo support for all available amiibo figures and cards. You can scan them onto the New 3DS’ bottom screen or the NFC adaptor for old 3DS/2DS models to generate random puzzles from their data based on the Word Maze, Mixup or One Word modes. The resulting puzzle usually references the owner of the amiibo e.g. their nickname as opposed to the amiibo character itself, which feels a bit lacking but the idea to put amiibo support in a third-party game can be challenging to most developers, so Lightwood Games get respect for trying.

The game in action…

The difficulty on these puzzles can vary from easy to very difficult. On some of them are hard to solve even with the hints on (which you can reveal by pressing the L and R buttons).  Out of all the modes I found Crossover to be the easiest, with Flowers and Mixups being the hardest.  The answers are derived from a huge variety of topics ; from shapes, colours even quotes from famous people and fictional characters.

Visually Word Puzzles is simple. It sticks to 2D, which is OK as there isn’t really need for things such as 3D features in word search and puzzles in most cases. At the end of each puzzle the cartoon dog from the game’s logo gives you a joke which can prove funny at times, or sometimes generic. There is a different music track for each mode you play, which is cool. That said, the track never changes within the respective modes, so you might get bored of the music after a while. This can even be slightly offputting when solving some of the harder puzzles.

Lightwood Games showing off Word Puzzles and more at the recent StreetPass London event

The game keeps track of your progress in revealing how many puzzles you have solved. There is also a StreetPass feature which compares your progress to other players. While this seems interesting I suspect it might be pointless unless you talk about it with other people.

Conclusion

Word Puzzles POWGI is a good game for playing at 5-10 minutes at a time. Some of the puzzles can be challenging, which is good for experts. However ; while this game has amiibo and StreetPass support they feel basic and tacked on. Nonetheless ; Word Puzzles does the job it sets out to.

Pros

• Good amount of puzzles to keep you busy.
• Loads of categories.
• Easy to pick up on the go.

Cons

• Music can be tiresome to listen to after a while.
• amiibo and StreetPass features are very basic.

Final Score: 7/10

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Tags: 2015, 2D, 3D, 3ds, 480 puzzles, amiibo, cards, celebrities, Circles, colours, Crossovers, crossword, ds, figures, Flowers, iOS, lightwood games, Mixups, NFC, One Word, POWGI, puzzle, quotes, review, shapes, Wii U, Word Maze, Word Puzzles

This post was written by Cyburn, posted on February 8, 2016 Monday at 9:00 am