I finally bit the bullet and leveled up to a 3GS last week. Gaming wasn’t the main reason I decided to donate an extra $30 a month to the AT&T empire, but it was quite high on my list of associated perks. On top of that, and additional pen for iPhone coverage made Nathan’s eyes light up like a Christmas tree, so here we are with my first stab at a new platform. The game in question is Y Media Lab’s alleged crossword/Sudoku/word search hybrid, Scruzzleword.
Though a bit daunting at first (the brief tutorial was less than clear), Scruzzleword eventually revealed itself to be a competent spin on previously established genre conventions. Letters are arranged on a grid, not unlike a word search. A handful of letters on the corners have a gold tint, which indicates that they’re “locked” in place. Every other letter on the grid can be moved, but the gold ones are the beginning and ends of prearranged words. Your ultimate goal is to move the free letters around and, like a crossword puzzle, make interlocking words out of the jumble.
Once a letter is placed in the right spot (within a block of a gold plated letter), it’s also locked into place. Furthermore, when tapped, any gold letter reveals a crossword puzzle-like hint about its larger word, both top to bottom and across. So, if you manage to clear a marvelous seven letter word, then you instantly have hints for a dozen other words in the grid. You can either use that knowledge to advance completion, or come to terms with your limited vocabulary and scramble letters around until you get lucky.
Once you get the hang of it (or if it sounds too easy in the first place), a challenge mode is available, Eschewing the bevy of hints, challenge mode only offers few clues in the way of completion. Honestly I found the easier mode to be more entertaining, mostly because I can’t see words like Neo can see the Matrix, but also because it took significantly less time to complete a game. Most of my games hovered around a delightful 5-10 minutes and, in a single work day at my other job; I was able to blow through ten of the game’s fifty levels. Not bad at all for the occasional free five minutes.
Promo for the game lists it as being better than Scrabble, which, in additional to being an outrageous claim, falls well short of the mark. Is it fun? You bet, but it lacks the tenacity, careful planning, score based objectives, and occasional mind numbing defeat of that multiplayer classic. Scruzzleword is a bunch of fun on your own and an exceptional time waster, but after you ace all fifty puzzles, how much fun can you have trying to beat your own times?
Having once reviewed a thirty dollar PSP Sudoku title, I’m somewhat accustomed to paying a copious amount of money for digitized a pen and paper game. Scruzzleword mostly sheds the “is this necessary” question by way of two noteworthy aspects. The first is the obvious; moving all of the letters around a board is somewhat impractical in real life and requires a touch or point and click interface, which, by the way, functions quite well on my iPhone. The second reason was the surprising fact that Scruzzleword is $1.99. After paying anywhere from $20-$50 for handheld games my whole life, forking over $2 for a competent puzzler seems almost too good to be true. Hell, I’ve paid more than that for game reservations I’ve never picked up. Scruzzleword may be light on options and may have failed to execute a few opportunities, but at $2, who cares?
Note: the game description boasts that Scruzzleword will be periodically updated with “new puzzles, vocabulary puzzles, foreign language puzzles, and specialty subject puzzles.” Additionally, early user reviews indicate a few instability problems, most notable that the game crashes or won’t resume after a phone call. I had multiple people call me as I was playing Scruzzleword, and the game never crashed. It always booted up fine for me, but I suppose individual results may vary.
