On paper, this did seem like a fun little casual title to get into. Worcle Words is a Nintendo 3DS game where you toss letters in between others to create words; if too many letters are grouped together without making a word, it’s Game Over. Yet, I can’t help but come away from this game frustrated.
Graphics
There isn’t much to look at on the game screen, but what’s there gets the job done. You have the word orbs on display and a variety of different backgrounds to keep things from looking monotonous. While the framerate maintains a smooth performance (This is a 2D game where hardly anything is on the screen, after all), oddly it gets unsteady in certain stages. Not to the point where there is drastic constant slowdown, but still weird for such a simple-looking title.
Audio
Primarily, Worcle Words‘s music consists of poppy, bubbly tunes, and it can be fun hearing the orbs pop. However, I tend to get annoyed with the music after a while. This probably isn’t the music’s fault, but there is another factor that convinces me to mute the volume when I have to keep hearing it over and over. This is due to restarting the stage too many times. Because the game itself is frustrating.
Gameplay
What pains me to judge Worcle Words‘s gameplay is I can see the concept working better than this. The execution ends up coming off as either too much of a cakewalk or an incentive to throw my 3DS across the room. The former is due to the stages prompting the player to make words with three letters or more; you can mindlessly toss orbs around the bottom screen and that aspect of the game snaps in half. But for stages requiring players to make bigger words, the random letter generator is destined to screw people over at some point. Maybe if the game lets you see more than two letters that would come to play, things would be fairer. Instead, I felt like I could never get the letters I needed at the right time. Further complicating matters is the fact that you need to create FIFTY words to move on to the next level. Isn’t that a bit too excessive? The stages drag as a result, and even if the sporadically cheap difficulty doesn’t get in the way of any enjoyment, the long level duration will instead.
Verdict
Overall, Worcle Words could have been good if the gameplay was ironed out more. The is marred by bothersome artificial difficulty and needless slogs. Online play is there for the people that would actually like to compete in this half-baked spelling exercise, but the single-player obviously doesn’t have the benefit of being enjoyed with another person. I don’t think I’ll see myself coming back to this one.
