"Wordtris" (Game Boy)

Brings that Tetris-style word building. Along with catchy music and decent controls, you can build many kinds of words. Yes, many.

If you didn't expect this, you probably haven't played/heard much about it. However, if you're a board game junkie and you've played the popular game of Scrabble, then you may feel at home with this. You're looking at Wordtris!

As you start the game, you see a SETUP screen to prep your game up before playing. First is the GAME MODE option for either SINGLE PLAYER or TOURNAMENT mode; Second is the DIFFICULTY setting where you can choose either Children's, Novice, Advanced or Expert mode; Third is the GAME LEVEL featuring A through J, and you can think of these as stage options; Fourth option is the TIME LIMIT where you can choose, Unlimited, 2:00, 5:00, 10:00 or 15:00 minutes; Fifth and final setting is the REPEAT WORDS options, very much meaning if you make the same word more than once. After choosing your options, you're all ready to go!

Instead of random shapes, you play with one letter at a time, and slowly you form simple words using the random letter blocks. The more words you form, the more points you accumulate. The easiest words to form are often the three-letter words while the hardest are the nine-letter words. Makes you want to bust out your thesaurus book and see what more words you can form. You may form words without knowing it and/or you may form words you didn't know existed in the English language! Then again, when it comes to forming words of your own, there's a good chance you may form explicit ones which makes for unsurprising humor for those who watch/play.

There blocks with question marks that when placed on your desired position, it unveils a random letter. When there's a clutter on your game board, there are times when a bomb appears and you can erase one letter on the board. Yeah, only one., not one column.

The music is cultural yet unique, though it gets repetitive at times. The graphics aren't much since the design is relatively simplistic; The controls are okay, as I sensed a few delays when the game starts to get faster and the blocks don't respond quickly. Oh, and four words: that dancing bear though....

That's about it. The game gets extremely tough especially at the random result in what letter comes next, all while trying to compose a legitimate word. All in all, aside of busting your word skills, this game very much is scoring the highest points in the game.

Would be nice to see more features in this simple game but other than that, it's one of those casual games you pop in while waiting for your flight, waiting for your class to start, waiting for the bus stop, something to play in a coffee shop to pass time or during your lunch break at work. As simple as this game is, I'm sure there's a knockoff of this game available for free on your Android's/iOS's app store.

I will close this review with one question: what happens when you spell RUSSIA or SOVIET? Will the game offer you dual citizenship with Russia? It's 2017, and despite the goings-on in the political world, and that this game features bombs, that was something I probably shouldn't be asking (it was meant as interrogative humor). Then again, this is a video game review, not the second coming of MSNBC/FOX News/C-SPAN.

Kris Caballero

Founder of KCU Network and KCU Plus, Kris has been writing since he managed a personal blog made back in late 2005. Officially back to doing computer programming (software development) and video production, Kris enjoys reading books on Mathematics, Quantum Computing, Philosophy, playing old video/DOS games, digital video archiving, and listening to sports, public radio and classical music.

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