Lumicon

There's something about word games that makes them addictive. It's like a chance to prove your mastery of the language you grew up with, coupled with the pastime everyone says is rotting your mind. The disease and the cure in one spoonful.

At the same time, there are only so many variations of the same tile-throwing Scrabble mash-up that you can play before you start to feel a little indifferent about proving your verbosity.

Lumicon just about manages to sidestep that particular peril with a liberal application of Tetris-style panic.

You begin the game with a series of blank bars. The bar at the bottom starts to fill with letters, and you need to slide them into one of the bars above to create words. If the bottom bar gets too full, it's Game Over.

As you add letters, the game speeds up, throwing more and more vowels and consonants into the bottom bar like a meth-crazed Countdown contestant.

By the time you've seen the words "speed increased" crawl across your screen two or three times, your ability to form words of more than three letters disappears, and all you can do is pray for an easy run to clear some backlog.

Once you've formed a word, tapping it clears the bar, leaving you free to try and add another one. Handily, the game highlights any words you've made, so when that jumble of letters you thought was nonsense actually turns out to be the name of a Tibetan yak, you can clear another bar and move on.

Clearing more than one word at once gives you a combo multiplier and boosts your score, and clearing three or more gives you a bonus, such as an extra vowel or a brief respite in the letters popping up along the bottom. There are three different difficulty settings, ranging from the sedate to the teeth-grindingly fast.

It's a shame that Lumicon doesn't have any extra tricks or modes up its sleeve, because while the core of the game is entertaining it does get repetitive after a while. Still, as word puzzles go it's certainly one of the most refreshing of recent times.