iPhone App Reviews

Woxel – Updated with more promo codes!

T.J. Brumfield | Jul 17, 2009 Games

User rating: (7 votes, average: 4.14 out of 5)

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I’m deleting Scramble from my iPhone. I know, I know. Zynga makes great games. Scramble in particular is great. But you have to understand. I just downloaded Woxel from Half Fast Games. Woxel is a 2D game that is displayed in 3D with some shabby textures. It doesn’t look as clean as Scramble. It doesn’t have the multiplayer that Scramble has. And yet, I am deleting Scramble none the less.

Why would I delete a great game for one that doesn’t offer multiplayer? I’m glad you asked. If you didn’t, I wouldn’t have much of a review to write. Woxel takes a familiar letter-combination game and adds unique twists to it. In the end, the game is better and I enjoy playing it more.

Woxel is about short rounds. I don’t want to stare at the same letters for three minutes. I feel particularly stupid when I miss words and other games reveal to me what I should have noticed. With short rounds, I have an excuse for being an idiot and missing obvious words. This is a game that forces you to think and react quickly. You can tap each letter individually, or drag your finger and trace a route to the letters. Dragging is probably quicker once you’re used to it. I’m new to the game, so I stuck with tapping.

The moment you start playing you might notice there are special blocks on the board. These blocks have different colors. Green blocks multiply the value of the letter. We’ll be talking about letter values more in a minute, but green blocks are nice. Red blocks multiply the word value and are very nice. Purple blocks add more time to the clock, allowing you to find more words.

You may note that I mentioned letter values. Certain letters are harder to use in words. I find it particularly frustrating in other word games when I get a difficult arrangement of letters. That should be reflected in my score. In Woxel, a Q awards you more points than an L, as it should. And unlike some other games, you have a fairly large board. You can ignore the Q and work around it, or try to involve it to score more points. You play according to your strategy and playing style that you enjoy.

Also unlike Scramble and other similar games, you’re not using the same letters forever. Not only is the round short, but when you use a letter, it disappears. You get those special blocks once in a word. Use them wisely. You get those high value letters, or easy letters, and then suddenly they are gone. You must constantly adapt to new letters as they appear.

This may be the best part though. When assembling words you can change direction. This is best displayed in the screenshots and video below, but I will attempt to explain it none the less. Let’s say I’m going to spell undulate. I didn’t get any 8 letter words when I was testing the game, but I’m going to pretend for a moment that I’m awesome and I did. I press the U first. The N must be connected to the U. However, when I press the D, it doesn’t have to connect to the N directly. I can connect to the N or U. As I select the second U, it can connect to the first U, the N or the D, and so on, and so on. With a fairly large playing board, it challenges you to look all over the place and get creative. There are far more possibilities in play.

Last but not least as far as unique twists go, names are in the dictionary. Have fun with that one!

After two rounds you get a bonus round, and then your score is posted on the high-score list if you make the cut.

I would love to see multiplayer get added at some point. Plenty of other iPhone/iPod apps let me find players online randomly from a list, with Facebook connect, a local user with wifi, or someone nearby via GPS location. Honestly, I don’t care which way they go. It would be nice if they implemented several of these methods. But I think multiplayer is the only thing keeping this from becoming an absolute must-own.

But for me personally, the enhanced gameplay trumps the lack of multiplayer. I expect it to become a staple on my phone.

Half Fast Games have offered up some promo codes. They’ll be in the usual place. You know what to do.

Tags: $0.99, Games, puzzle, T. J. Brumfield, Word