AlphaBattle attempts to stand out from the rest of the pack with a unique take on wordplay that will have you cursing in frustration and cheering in elation from the off.
Upon starting the game, scrolling rows of letter tiles appear at the top and bottom of your screen: consonants slide across the bottom and vowels slide across the top. The speed of their movement is dictated by the difficulty setting, and once the first letter in the column reaches the centre of the screen the entire column becomes inactive.
In order to slow the process, you have to eliminate letter tiles to spell words. Naturally, the longer the word the more points you score and, just like in Scrabble, the more exotic letters (e.g. X, Y, Z) have greater values. Green letter tiles clear the entire row and score more points at the same time.
Once a word is entered, you swipe your finger to the right of the screen to submit it and to the left to clear. For the most part the control element is slick, despite occasional unresponsive swipes.
Another minor annoyance is the lack of an option to delete the last letter you’ve entered. The letter tiles are fairly small, and if you’re a fat-fingered person you're sure to find typos a real nuisance.
Games tend to last no longer than a couple of minutes. It ensures quick play, but due to the frantic nature of the game it's a struggle to enter words much longer than four letters. More often than not you find yourself simply sandwiching vowels between two consonants in the vague hope that 'wag,' 'meg,' 'sig,' 'nom,' or 'fug' is a word.
Curiously, the game lacks music. While the sound effects are decent enough, a couple of jingles in the background that increase in tempo when you approach the end of a run surely isn’t too much to ask?
Despite its setbacks, there are moments of joy to be had with AlphaBattle. The rare instances of nailing a nine-letter-long monster of a word or wiping the board clean of tiles and snatching a brief respite from the jaws of defeat demonstrate that there's a subtly addictive game in there, waiting to be found.
AlphaBattle
AlphaBattle is a decent word game let down by deficient controls and the need for a more polished execution
Tom Love
Tom has recently migrated south for the winter after blagging his way through university. Living alone and diagnosed with an extreme case of post-study depression, Tom joins the Pocket Gamer staff in a futile attempt to become a functioning member of society.