Wuzzle

Word puzzles aren’t generally all that intensive, requiring a collected, contemplative approach. This is a little odd, to be quite honest, as there are plenty of popular quiz shows built around the contestants' ability to spell under pressure.

One of the most significant features of the new Android game Wuzzle is its use of a ticking clock to inject a bit of tension to the word play, which adds a surprising amount of depth to the game.

Essentially, it’s a wordsearch, built on a much smaller game board and allowing you to form words in a non-linear fashion. You can choose between four-by-four or five-by-five boards, and a random selection of letters populates the screen at the beginning of each game. The system also takes a moment to calculate all the possible points available to you, so you can aim for the maximum score on each round.

Hitting that score is nigh on impossible. You form words by drawing a line around the touchscreen between immediately adjacent letters - allowing you to move diagonally, and in any direction, so long as the line of letters is continuous and doesn’t cross back over itself.

This makes it pretty tricky to decipher the longer words, but not being restricted to straight lines - as you are with a typical wordsearch - is also quite liberating. There are two game modes available to you: Open and Progressive.

An Open board offers you access to all the available letters, and it’s simply a case of making as many complete words as possible. The Progressive mode is considerably more unusual, however.

A small number of letters are initially accessible, and the system tells you how many words are possible within the selection. To begin with, this will only be three or four words, and once you’ve discovered them all the selection of available letters is expanded. Once again, you’re told how many possible combinations can be achieved before more letters are added.

Vocabulary is an important factor in such games, and it seems that Wuzzle is quite well endowed. On occasion, tenuous words such as ‘arse’ presented themselves, and the game happily accepted them. It also seems willing to accept either UK or US spellings (or, indeed, both in the same game), so there’s no cause for concern over it cheating you out of a few points for the sake of being pedantic.

There’s also the option to play online against friends or random opponents, pitting you against another player as you battle it out for the highest score in the same timeframe. Results are shown at an online leaderboard, and it seems as though there are enough players to be able to get a match most any of the time.

Graphically, Wuzzle is more efficient than dazzling, but the board can always be read at a quick glance, which is very important as the seconds begin to count down. Likewise, the audio serves its purpose but no more.

It probably won’t be long before you begin to hanker for an extra game mode, or some other way to inject a bit of extra life into Wuzzle, but it’s undeniably one of those casual applications that you’ll turn to when a few moments of escapism are required, or you find yourself standing in a queue.