Game Reviews

Alphapit - Pits you against your vocabulary

Star onStar onStar onStar onStar off
|
iOS
| Alphapit
Get
Alphapit - Pits you against your vocabulary
|
iOS
| Alphapit

Alphapit is a word game that's not afraid to run around on its own, choosing its own path in a world of Scrabble clones and competitive word-creators.

It's sort of like a wordsearch, but you don't know what words you're supposed to be looking for. You can change the letters around, and if you get stuck you can blow things up with a bomb. Yup. Just like a wordsearch.

The art style has the minimalist twang that's popular in word-making spheres nowadays, and the gameplay is slick and rewarding, and not afraid to kick you in the face if you're not paying attention.

Let's have words

The aim of the game is to clear a grid of letters. You do this by creating words of three letters or more. The letters you use need to be connected, but you can connect them horizontally, vertically, diagonally, or a mixture of all three. You can make backwards words too.

There are a few extra twists though. You get two spare tiles at the bottom of the screen that you can swap in if you're stuck for words. You can also change the letters on the tiles by tapping or long pressing.

Obviously you can't just cycle through the alphabet, but move one to three letters up or down the scale depending on the tile you want to change.

You also get three different powers, which you can use to undo a move, blow up a tile, or shuffle the entire board for different letters.

There are 200 levels to work your way through, which should set you up for a good couple of weeks of play. And you can always go back when you've got to the end, if you're glutton for punishment.

How do you spell that?

The extra layers of complexity here really spark the game into life. You're not just finding the best words, you're trying to create your own by shuffling the letters around and trying to make them more favourable.

There are tactics here as well. It's all well and good matching the first word you see, but if it leaves you with a bunch of vowels in a corner on their own you're going to be hard-pressed to clear the board without using some of your precious special moves.

Alphapit is a word game with style and flair, and more than its fair share of decent ideas. If you like letters, and engaging with letters for the purpose of enjoyment, then you should definitely pick it up.

Alphapit - Pits you against your vocabulary

A fresh word game that shakes things up just enough to make it feel like you're doing something new
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.