Word on Word
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| Word on Word

There's nothing wrong with difficult games. Sometimes it's the frustration of failure that pushes us on to overcome a challenge.

Word on Word is constantly tough, and often cruel, which makes the moments when you manage to defeat it even sweeter than they would otherwise be.

The problem is, there's not enough variety to make the game really stand out, and not enough fun to ensure you'll come back for more.

Word down

The game plays like a verbose Tetris. You start with five letters arranged at the bottom of the screen, and you can arrange them in whatever order you see fit. Once you click 'start', more blocks start to appear at the top of the screen, and you have to position them to make words.

The longer the words you make, the more points you earn. Eventually, the grid will be full, your score will be totted up, and it'll be Game Over. There's a huge number of different sequences to play through, each giving you different letters in a different order.

In each round you have a joker, accessed by tapping the '#' key on your phone. This tile can be any letter you choose, letting you build up a bigger score than you'd otherwise have been able to.

There's no change in the pace of the gameplay, and no new tiles or traps to make things more interesting. It's like you're building a wordsearch from scratch, and trying to score as many points as you can at the same time.

Word across

It's unlikely that the game will capture your imagination, but it's not really designed for that. It's not flashy or gimmicky -it's just a hard, uncompromising word game that's all about outsmarting and out-spelling yourself.

This is the digital equivalent of a crossword. It's there to pass the time, and while there's a sense of pride when you do well it's forgotten as soon as you put your phone down.

Word on Word can't quite strike the balance between compelling gameplay and frustrating obstacles that marks out the very best puzzle games. It still manages to be an entertaining little title, but it's not quite as clever as it thinks it is.

Word on Word

By no means a bad game, Word on Word is about as no-frills as mobile games come, and that might put a lot of people off
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Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.