#126: Wordtris

Nice flipped 'R'!

I'd never heard of the game Wordtris, but just from the name I was envisioning some sort of cross between Scrabble and Tetris. Turns out that's pretty much exactly what it is. Instead of Tetris blocks you're dropping squares with a single letter on them. Form a word horizontally or vertically and score points. The bigger the word, the more points you get. Seems simple enough...

Tasty fire?!?

The twist comes with the mechanic in the middle of the screen, which is basically like quicksand. A single block will float on the surface. Add a block on top of that one and it'll push the previous block down. But only until it hits the bottom at which point it will start stacking up. It made working out what was going to happen a little tricky, but in a cool way.

I lose. 8(

After you complete a few words it advances to the next 'level' which causes the blocks to fall faster and faster. They were falling so fast that I couldn't actually figure out where I wanted to put a block. The best I could do was try to see if it was a vowel coming down and throw those into specific columns and hope words got formed. They often did, but it wasn't much fun since I didn't really feel like I could make decisions. Tetris works the same way I guess, but in that game you only have something like 7 possible options so it's easier to glance up and parse what's coming next and make a plan. Here with the blocks sinking and 29 possible options (a bomb, a dynamite, and a ?) it just wasn't feasible to play more than a few levels. (I died on level H, or 8.)

And I have no idea what's going on with the circus themed pictures on the right hand side of the screen.

This felt like it could have been a pretty cool idea for a game. But the blocks need to fall a lot slower, or possible not fall at all until the user drops them. You could have the points scale according to how long it took you, but then you could still take the time to work out a combo or whatever.

Rating: C