Literary beat-'em-up Writer Rumble hits the App Store on Thursday

If you ask me, PopCap is throwing away money every second that Bookworm Adventures is not available on iOS. That addictive mix of turn-based RPG and Scrabble-like word game would be a perfect fit for the App Store.

Maybe Writer Rumble, by Washington-based indie startup Feel Every Yummy, can fill that void for now, though.

Writer Rumble is a vocab battler, where you have to quickly find words in a messy sea of letter tiles to do damage against the waves of enemies that are attacking you. You can also use special powers to, for example, scramble the board or get back health.

It's not a carbon copy of Bookworm. You have to find words by linking together adjacent tiles - like SpellTower and Puzzlejuice - and it's not turn based. You don't get half an hour to form the perfect eight-letter adjective. You construct words quickly, or you die.

Writer Rumble boasts great presentation. I especially like the characters - they're based on six literary legends, including spunky detective chick Agatha, blind bard Homer, and a boy called Howard who calls on a tentacled monster to fight his battles.

Alongside an endless single-player survival mode, Writer Rumble's got a full suite of multiplayer modes. You've got online multiplayer with your friends or random fighters, and local play either over Bluetooth or - if you're playing on iPad - on one device.

Writer Rumble has been a long time coming. It was first announced, under the name Word Fighter, in August 2011, but it's finally out on Thursday. It'll cost you 69p / 99c on iOS. An Android edition is coming in "early 2013".