| Author | Review |
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Worhammer
170,683
TA Score for this game: 251
Posted on 26 April 12 at 16:44, Edited on 26 April 12 at 16:58 |
This review has 29 positive votes and 3 negative votes. Please log in to vote. |
As with all my WP7 reviews, this review is based on the game as a mobile game, and not compared to full-fledged console titles.
First off, let me say I hate word games. I hate scrabble. I hate boggle. I hate crosswords. I hate word searches. It could be because I suck at them. For some reason, though, I love this game. I can't get enough of it. There's something about sliding my finger around the screen as fast as I can that is addicting.
So what else is there to say? Well, I guess I could explain to you what the game actually is. It's basically boggle. I can't tell you if there are any differences in rules because I have only ever played boggle once, and I hated it so much that I quit after the third round. So I will just get as basic as possible.
The idea behind Wordament is simple. You have two minutes to find as many words on the screen as possible. You find these words by dragging your finger from letter to letter. There are only two or three rules to follow, so it isn't hard to get the hang of it. The tile you move to has to be adjacent to the one you are currently touching, and you can't use the same tile more than once. That's it. Each tile is awarded a certain number of points based on the rarity of words you can use it with (a Y for example is worth more than an A or an H) and you get huge bonuses for longer 6 - 8 (or more) letter words rather than shorter 3 - 4 letter words.
There are two special rounds in the english version with increased bonuses for certain words. There is the theme round which has a special theme such as transportation words like car, plane, bike, train, etc. The other is the diagram round where you have one special tile with two letters on it; for example, "LL" which would be used to form words like Grill, Tall, Stall, and the like.
The achievements may seem hard at first, but with practice most will be attainable. There are several leaderboard based achievements, which some of you will find rather annoying. One of them is to place first in one round. Doing that will earn you two others: Place in the top 10% and top 50% of said round. There's also an hourly leaderboard which you have to take first on, and finally to place in the top 250 players overall. This will be based on the yearly leaderboards which are reset April 1st of every year. There may possibly be other semi-permanent learderboards which will be introduced in the future, according to Wordament's website.
Each round takes two minutes, with your score being ranked in comparison to every person on the planet who plays that round with you. This means that some of the leaderboard achievements will be harder to obtain than others. I didn't find it hard to place in the top 50%, but it took me several hours of practice to play in the top 10%. I don't have much hope of ever placing first in a round or managing to top the hourly leaderboard. After each round, there's a 45 second period where your score is evaluated. The first 30 seconds are based on how you did as far as finding words on the board. The last 14 seconds show how well did in comparison to everybody who played that round with you.
Which brings me to my next suggestion: Don't use a word solver. There have already been a couple bans for people using these and the Wordament team seems pretty dedicated to rooting out the cheaters. I find this to be especially good given that since there are three leaderboard based achievements, there won't be anybody complaining about the leaderboards being impossible to move up in because they're hacked like in so many other games.
So that's it. The game is free, it's got 200 gamerscore, and it's bug-free as far as I can tell. There isn't much more to say. Give it a try and see if you like it. You're unlikely to unlock an achievement straight away unless you're not careful (watch out for "Spin Cycle" and don't do any diagram or theme words if you're worried).
Graphics: 5 / 5
It's a bunch of letter tiles on a screen. What is there to judge?
Sound: 5 / 5
Aside from some music to signal the last 10 seconds of the round, and some chimes and bongs here and there not too much to say.
Controls: 5 / 5
The only real thing to judge the game on other than how fun it is for you or me, which is subjective. Responsive and in the week or so I've been playing there has yet to be a time when I had a problem. The best part is if you accidentally hit one of the standard buttons at the bottom, you can quickly press the back arrow without losing anything other than a few seconds.
Achievements: 3 / 5
Points off for leaderboard based achievements. If you don't mind getting banned, you can use a boggle solver. 
Replayability: 5 / 5
Endless. If you don't like the game after 5 minutes, that's unlikely to change. If you do, you might find yourself in the same place as me. Wondering why you're having so much fun with such a simple concept that you usually hate.
Overall: 5 / 5
I can't think of anything bad to say about this game. It's free. It's fun. With each round taking 2 minutes, you can play it any time. You can start up or quit out in the middle of a round with no penalty, and you can compete against friends or strangers. Give it a try, you might find yourself pleasantly surprised.
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ZX KNIGHT
37,482
TA Score for this game: 207
Posted on 13 May 12 at 11:22 |
This review has 11 positive votes and 1 negative vote. Please log in to vote. |
Wordament is the latest, and in my opinion quite comfortably the greatest game to be released under the Xbox LIVE label for Windows Phone.
Put simply it's a Boggle clone and was actually released a while ago as a non-Xbox LIVE game before quickly becoming one of the most popular games in the marketplace, at which point Microsoft asked the developers to convert it to a free, ad-supported Xbox LIVE title.
Although always secondary in a word based game, the design and presentation of Wordament really is a cut above the competition, incorporating the unique Windows Phone (and coming soon, Windows 8) Metro User Interface to create a very neat, stylised and intuitively easy to use interface.
Unlike other word games such as Wordrix and Word Tangle, Wordament is a never-ending, 24/7 online word tournament. This means that when you join a new game it will probably be half way through an existing online 'board' as only one is active at any time. It's not really an issue but it is something to be aware of as you begin playing, as when you join a game with ten seconds left you don't have much time to move up the leaderboards. Thankfully each game only uses around 12-14k of your data (before ads are accounted for) so you can play a hundred games and barely use a megabyte of your data allowance.
Like all Boggle-style word games, you can make words in Wordament by chaining together letters in any direction, up, down, left, right or diagonal. You can also rotate the board to help you look for sequences of letters to help you find words.
The words themselves are scored as either 'common' or 'obscure', with bonus points available for lengthy words, although I'm not sure if you get bonus points for obscure words. To shake things up further, some boards have a double letter tile, and you have the option of trying to find every word combination possible that contains this double letter (e.g. CH, or IE). If the possibility of bonus points wasn’t enough, naturally an achievement is also linked to this.
The end of each match displays a leaderboard showing the top players across the world, their score, the number of words they found and their country, along with a range of players either side of your own position. If you want to look at the full leaderboard you have to leave the round to do so. On their blog the developers explain this is the easiest way to pull out the relevant information for you before the next board starts. It also helps keep your data usage to a minimum.
On the home page you are presented with a bundle of extra stats relating to your performances, including your biggest scoring word, cumulative score and the number of games played. What the creators of Wordament have understood is that you cannot provide gamers with enough stats and leaderboards. Bungie understood this long ago and it’s one of the reasons Halo stands a cut above nearly every other FPS out there for longevity (in the Left 4 Dead series you don’t even know your cumulative zombie kill once you’ve surpassed the relevant achievements). They’re presented in a way that means you can completely ignore them if you wish, but if you love stats then you can look them up any time allowing the game to appeal to casual and hardcore gamers alike.
By becoming an Xbox LIVE game it also syncs your friends list to the ‘frenemies’ section. Your frenemies are other players who you have selected to follow, tracking their scores and leaderboard positions and showing you their best daily score. It’s a great little system but if you don’t have too many friends with Windows Phones it feels a bit odd to be randomly selecting strangers to have as frenemies.
Worse still, the ‘beat your frenemies’ achievement is fundamentally flawed, as it’s simple to quickly select a frenemy who performs worse than you in games and then beat them in the subsequent game to unlock the achievement. Its purpose in encouraging you to use the frenemies system is understandable, but as an achievement it’s pretty worthless and I actually unlocked it by accident after adding some frenemies without realising it.
Speaking of achievements, they are by and large thoughtfully implemented and the team explain the thinking behind their approach in a blog post. Although you can get roughly 50% of the achievements within a day or two’s worth of gaming, a quick glance through them shows that some of them are very difficult to unlock, particularly an achievement for being number one in the world in any given round. Nonetheless, it’s also an apt achievement for a word game that ranks players across the world, so it’s hard to quibble with its presence in Wordament, even if I’ll never come close to unlocking it.
Multiple languages are available and while one achievement will unlock if you play in a different language it’s not something the uni-lingual players like me will ever really use. However, for multilingual players it’s a great way to test the vocabulary of your second or third language and obviously it's nice for people who aren't first language English to be able to play in their native language if it is supported.
Overall Wordament is easily the best word search game available on the Windows Phone. The online nature of the never-ending tournament means that you need to have a phone signal to play, so I won’t be uninstalling Wordrix just yet, but it hasn't been out of my 'Recent' list since downloading it. The range of ways to accumulate points combined with the presence of achievements makes it a cut above the competition and comfortably the best free Xbox LIVE game on the marketplace and one of the best Xbox LIVE games full stop.
Put simply, stop reading this review and go download Wordament.
Now.
Or if you want a higher scoring word...
Immediately.
This was also posted on: http://zombiesatemyxbox.com/2012/05/10/wordament-review-for-...
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