xbox live indie game reviews

Wordzy wants to be Lingo, the word-puzzle version of Mastermind that runs on the Game Show Network. Given a board with six (whoops--"Wordzy" is six, the game is 5) empty tiles (or with the first letter filled in, depending on your settings), you make a guess at the word. Letters contained in the solution are highlighted red if they appear in the proper place and yellow if they're in the wrong place but contained in the solution somewhere. Like Lingo, Wordzy works better as a multiplayer game--beating an opponent is more satisfying than simply guessing a random word.

What dooms Wordzy is the controls. Lingo is relatively fast-paced for a gameshow. When one word doesn't pan out, you can guess another word as soon as you think of a suitable alternative. Thinking of a new word to try out is the fun part of the game, but 95% of the gameplay is just entering your damn word. Each spot in the five-letter board forces you to either scroll up past 'A' or down past 'Z' until you get to the letter you want. If you want an 'M' or an 'N', you've got to mash it 13 times. Why you can't just hold down up or down to cycle through the letters is beyond me, but even that would be unnecessarily cumbersome.

Instead of the word-guessing game it wants to be, Wordzy is a word-entering game with a terrible interface for entering words. Instead of reminding me of Lingo, it reminds me of old-school arcade games where you had to cycle through all the letters to put your initials on the high score board. There's a reason most of those high score boards were filled with 'AAA'--it's a pain in the ass to cycle through even three letters. There are several game modes to select from, but "timed" mode is probably the most insulting. Instead of being rewarded for how fast I can guess the word, it definitely felt like I was being rewarded for how fast I can select the tiles for the proper word.

When playing, the game doesn't remember your game settings between games. That means if you want to play 3-rounds of timed mode, you're going to have to toggle over to 3 rounds every time you play. If the dictionary actually manages to stump you, there's no "give up" option. You're basically just stuck there until you quit out, which doesn't even give you the satisfaction of a reveal.  The UI and the music for Wordzy are as polished as the gameplay (which is to say--not very), resulting in a game that's just not worth the points (any points).