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Word Scramble Review
Written by Chris Buffa on Monday, March 16, 2009
Hundreds of words to find, touch screen controls, four-person multiplayer.
Tough finding people online, people with large fingers may choose the wrong letters by accident.
Word Scramble (also known as Scramble Live) challenges you to make words from groups of letters spread across a 4X4 or 5X5 grid. You have two or three minutes to do this, depending on the selected time limit, and the game allows you to connect letters by moving up, down, diagonally or in a zigzag pattern. A little bit of luck can score you some points, but in order to win big, you'll need to have a huge vocabulary.
To play, you press a letter on the iPhone's touch screen and create a word by dragging your finger across additional letters. As you drag, the game spells out the word (or disaster) at the top of the screen; green means you formed a word, red means try again. At any time, you can place two fingers on the top row of letters and move them clockwise/counter clockwise to rotate the entire grid. Although doing this doesn't jumble them up, the new perspective may reveal new words.
Unlike ngmoco's WordFu, Scramble Live doesn't have power ups that freeze time or double your score. It's just you and the clock. In addition, you can only make words that are three letters or more (forget about spelling me, go, in or he). When time runs out, the game shows you the available words for that grid and highlights the ones you found in green.
If single player bores you, there's always multiplayer. Scramble Live features both off and online play. In offline, you take turns finding words (after your two or three minutes are up, you pass the phone to the next person). Sadly, we were unable to find other players online.
We also had trouble with the controls, thanks to our large fingers. Because the letters are so close together, we often selected the wrong one by accident and failed to spell the intended word correctly. Seeing as how time plays such a huge factor, this mars what is otherwise a well-made game.
If you can only afford one word finding game, we strongly suggest purchasing WordFu because of its neat dice physics and impressive kung-fu effects. That said, Scramble Live is a fun app that'll give your brain a workout.
