Game Title: Word Puzzles by POWGI
Company: Lightwood Games
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Digital
Battery Life: 4.5 – 6 hours
Cloud Save Support: Yes
Download: 80.4 MB

Word Puzzles are a guilty pleasure when it comes to games. Awhile back, we got a great little Word Search game on the Switch that I really enjoyed. When you don’t want some action-packed, strategy game, it’s nice to just sit back and enjoy a little casual word puzzle to pass the time.

Thankfully, the Powgi games weren’t done there. Later this month, we’re getting a nice, big variety of puzzles for all you casual players out there. Here is my review of Word Puzzles by Powgi for the Nintendo Switch!

Gameplay

This is a large collection of different sorts of Word Puzzles. From cross-words to guessing games to unscrambling games, a lot of interesting and unique puzzles involving figuring out or finding words.

One thing I will note is that the Wii U version’s “Amiibo” feature seems to have been removed, which was used for making custom puzzles.

There really isn’t any “progression” in this game, as all of the puzzles are unlocked from the get-go. You have 6 different puzzle types, each with hundreds of puzzles a piece for you to solve, all built to make you think and try to figure out and recall knowledge to be able to solve.

The big appeal of this game vs the Word Search game is the variety in what you’re doing. As I said above, you’ve got 6 different types of puzzles to go through. You’ve got the simpler Word Maze, which is like a Word Search, but the words move around the grid and complete a Maze-like pattern to the more difficult Circles where you to unscramble circle grids to share letters and still spell out words of a certain theme.

If you’re not terribly big on brain-bending puzzles, there is a built-in Hint feature. The game will log if you use it, but it’ll make things easier, like revealing what words are in each Word Maze instead of having you guess or giving you the first letters of each word in the guessing-oriented games.

Of course, if you ask me, the most interesting part of this game is how much content you’re getting here. If you recall, Word Search by Powgi gives you around 320 puzzles for $7.99. Word Puzzles costs $9.99 but offers you far more, at well over 1,300 different puzzles to solve. If you ever get tired of that, though, you can also buy DLC for $9.99 to double that amount to over 2,600 puzzles, which is a massive leap over that 320 puzzles in Word Search, which is substantial in itself when compared to Word Search books you can buy in retail stores.

This ties into length to give you tons to do. Each puzzle isn’t very long, normally clocking me an average of 30-60 seconds, making the entire game a bare minimum of 10-12 hours of content. If you’re a fan of Word Puzzles, you’re gonna be very, very busy.

Controls

Controls are pretty simple here. When you’re in handheld mode, you can do everything with the touch controls, but button controls are also an option.

Navigating the menus is done with the Arrow Buttons / D-Pad, but can also be done with either of the analog sticks. The triggers can be used for activating hints for puzzles. You actual interact with puzzles with the A button for selecting options and B for canceling options. It’s pretty simple.

Presentation

Not much to say here. There aren’t any “graphics”, really. The game looks nice and clear and it never had any problems freezing or lagging on me.

Battery Life

As expected, the Battery Range of this game is pretty amazing. Here are my Battery TImes, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 44 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 5 hours, 02 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 5 hours, 54 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 6 hours, 15 minutes

This is just slightly under Word Search by Powgi, but still great.

In conclusion, Word Puzzles by Powgi has a lot to offer any fan of word puzzles, from cross-word mazes to word scrambles. On the downside, the Wii U’s amiibo feature is gone, but with over 1300 puzzles available for ten bucks and that much more available via DLC, you won’t be running out of puzzles to do anytime soon.

Final Score: 9.5/10