Bookworm

Worms don't have the best public image, really. Generations of children grew up thinking they were only good for eating at the bottom of the garden when you were in a huff.

More recently, video games have portrayed them as armed-to-the-teeth psychos, liable to chuck a grenade or banana bomb at you before exploding in your face if you kill them. For shame.

Bookworm is different, focusing on the more bookish characteristics of our wiggly friends. How do they hold the books to read? We don't know! How do their bookish spectacles stay on with no ears? We don't know!

Can't you suspend your disbelief?

Anyway, Bookworm is PopCap's second self-published mobile game, and is based on one of the company's most popular online/PC casual titles. It's also the most addictive word game we've played on mobile in a long while.

The basic idea is simple. You're presented with a grid of tiles, and have to make words from letters that are next to each other. In that sense, it's like boardgame Boggle. You score points for word length and also complexity, which brings in elements of Scrabble, too.

As you make words, the tiles are removed from the board and eaten by Lex the Bookworm (who sits at the bottom left of the screen) with tiles above them falling down, leaving space for more to appear from the top (think Bejeweled).

However, there's so much more to it than that. Making five-, six-, seven- or eight-letter words earns you a green, gold, sapphire or diamond tile respectively, which when used in a word earns bonus points. As you go, you reach new levels, and are assigned ranks to chart your progress.

Sometimes burning tiles will appear, which you have to get rid of quickly, as they consume their way through the letter beneath every turn, and if they reach the bottom of the board, it's game over. Meanwhile, if you're stuck, you get a certain number of Scrambles which jumble the board up to give you a fresh start.

There's two modes to play. Classic is the basic game, where you have as much time as you want to peruse the board and make words. Meanwhile, Action is played against the clock and if you're too slow, burning tiles appear.

It's extremely addictive, especially as you get more into the game. You start by just making any old short word but as you get better you'll find yourself scanning the board for letters, and then making words purely to line up a storming seven-letter masterpiece with a bonus tile or two in it.

The way you enter words is innovative, too. You can move a cursor around, as you would in most mobile puzzlers, but you can also type words using your mobile keypad, with predictive text figuring out where on the board they are (and if there are multiple choices, you cycle through them using a soft-key). It's a neat and well thought out input system.

Crucially, there seems to be a wide and comprehensive vocabulary (PopCap claims it's up to 140,000 words), so it's rare to find a word that you know is real, but Bookworm won't accept. Apart from swearwords, mind. Don't expect to be scoring points for your filthy language.

The downside? If you're not wordy, you won't be interested in Bookworm, so in that respect, it's got slightly narrower appeal than PopCap's previous game, Chuzzle. That's not a criticism as such, but more a recognition that some people will look at a screen full of letters and avoid it.

Still, for everyone else, Bookworm is an impressive and addictive puzzler that throws a new spin on the match-three subgenre. We feel smarter already after playing it for a couple of weeks, and ought to mention our renewed respect for those literary little invertebrates.