iPhone App Review: WordsWorth

January 27, 2009 by Jason Kaneshiro

This is the first guest post by Jason Kaneshiro.

WordsWorth is an iPhone and iPod Touch game where you try to identify as many words as possible from a honeycomb pattern of lettered tiles.

The Good

Simple game play. Words are created by tapping fingers on consecutive tiles or dragging a finger across them. Once a valid word is created, its tiles disappear, and tiles above fall to fill in the spaces, Tetris-style.
A variety of special tiles keeps things interesting: red timed titles with a clock that ends the game if it winds down, green bonus tiles that increase a word’s score, and blue wild card tiles that automatically change their letters to match the word you’re building.
If you feel limited by the tiles, you can shake your iPhone to shuffle them. A shuffle adds a timed tile. You have a limited amount of shuffles per game.
The graphics have a decent amount of polish, with a library / wood theme. There’s also a cartoon fellow whom I assume is William Wordsworth (ha ha).
Settings allow for a decent amount of control over game difficulty. You can set a minimum word size, grid size, number of shuffles per level, the amount of time for the timed tiles, and the dictionary used for word evaluation.

The Bad

The zappy, spacey sound effects are a bit over the top, and slightly inappropriate for the game graphics. The timer alarm sound is particularly annoying.
Would be neat if the tiles fell in different directions based on the iPhone’s tilt.

Conclusion

Although Wurdle is still my favorite iPhone word-hunt game, WordsWorth has enough variation through different tiles and settings that it comes a close second. $1.99 is a fair price.