WordCrafting: A Tower of Words

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WordCrafting: A Tower of Words

by Aethyna Feb 25, 2018 | 1 Votes | 1 Played | 0 Reviews

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Genres:

Word

Graphics:

2D

Labels:

Word Unscrambler , Storytelling , Crossword , Scrabble , Competitive , Tower-Building

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Happy Skellies WordCrafting: A Tower of Words is a very intriguing and unique, fantasy-themed word puzzle game that combines the strategy and physics needed in tower-building games with the fun of unscrambling the letters in a word and making crossword puzzles. It may not be the easiest game to get into, but once you get how it works, you will quickly realize how refreshingly entertaining it is. Play Now Similar Games Played Post a Review

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Summary Plotline Gameplay Community Graphics/ Sound Conclusion

Summary

WordCrafting: A Tower of Words is a very interesting and unique, fantasy-themed word game that combines the strategy and physics needed in tower-building games with the fun of unscrambling the letters in a word and making crossword puzzles. It may not be the easiest game to get into, particularly because of how different and challenging its gameplay can be, but once you get into it, you’ll find the game to be irresistible.

Plotline

The game starts off with a very simple story introduction whereby apparently, the pages of a once-powerful manuscript has all turned into blank pages. This is true except for a single page that details how you can retrieve the other missing pages, that is by building towers of words to reach wells that have somehow been floated into the sky. The plotline so far doesn’t really make sense, and considering the game’s theme, it doesn’t really have to be. After all, how many times have you seen heroes in fantasy novels who “have” to do something that they don’t really have to do.

Also, the story does try to explain the world this game is set in and what caused it as you recover more pages… no spoilers!

Gameplay

Now, before we get into the gameplay, you should know that WordCrafting is a very unique word game and as such, it might be a bit difficult for you to wrap your head around, but bear with me and you’ll be rewarded with the knowledge that such a brilliant game exists!

Anyway, to start, the game has multiple game modes which will be unlocked as you complete the previous mode. So, you’ll start off with its easiest MishMash mode, which basically consists of tower-building and unscrambling letters, to Classic mode that will require you to form your own words (like in Scrabble) as you build your towers; and lastly, to Endless mode whereby you will attempt to build the highest tower you can and see how well you rank among your friends on the leaderboard.

Due to its uniqueness, WordCrafting may not be an easy game to get into. For MishMash mode for instance, you’ll need to understand that the words you form are assigned based on how you swipe. It’s very much like crossword really, except that you don’t have control over which words are formed. Instead, you only can control where the word should go on the tower, and how long the word should be.

To make a word in this game, you just need to press and hold a bit until a flash of light appears, and then swipe left or right, or up or down. Note that being a crossword, you’ll need to have at least 1 letter intersecting with your existing tower. To cancel the word you are making, just use another finger – any one will do – and tap on the screen. You could also form the word first and discard it by tapping on the “Bin” icon, but you should know that you only have limited numbers of discards per level and it’s best to not waste them.

The game gives you limited potions to form your tower of words as well. You’ll need 1 potion to form one word and you’ll get around 12 of them at the start of every level, but you can grab more by forming words that help you collect extra potions that are scattered around your tower. The game also offers a mini-game where you can collect letters (on clover leaves) that are similarly scattered around and use them to form the Word of the Day for extra rewards.

That being said, the words that are formed at your tower aren’t spelt correctly though, so you will need to find the offending letter and swipe to shift it towards the correct position. This is mostly easy to do, and if you don’t know the answer, you can pretty much “brute force” your way through most of the time. However, if you need to, the game does provide you with hints that you can use. Note that although you have all the time in the word to figure out how to unscramble the letters, the game does eventually add in a timer, making things a bit more urgent and interesting.

Anyway, the game mechanics behind this little but significant aspect of its gameplay is brilliant enough for me to go on and on about it, but what you should know is that for this mode, the main thing is knowing how to build a structurally-sound… -ish… tower just so you can reach the next well and get the next page. The word puzzle part just isn’t as important since the puzzles are pretty easy to solve most of the time.

However, this might be easier said than done as well. The game does have some really astoundingly realistic physics so you can’t really try to cheat your way to the next level by building a lopsided tower without any support whatsoever. Instead, it’s crucial for you to have a strong enough foundation just so the later (and topmost) part of your tower won’t collapse on you. If it does collapse, you’ll then lose the level, lose a life, and have to start over.

Now, when I said “start over”, I don’t mean start from the ground up. This is because the game has a freezing mechanic that helps you stabilize the part of the tower that you’ve built in the previous level, ensuring you that your tower will at least not fall like a house of cards, but more like Jenga where most of the bottom part (that’s built in previous levels) should still be intact. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, a snowflake may float down from the sky and if it touches an unfrozen part of the tower, it will help you solidify the said part so you won’t need to worry about it collapsing later on.

If you’re wise – and I’m sure you are, you might want to look into “borrowing” some of the tiny floating isles as additional support to build your tower. These isles can be huge lifesavers since you can use them to basically build a solid sub-foundation for subsequent tower-building work.

The game also lets you know approximately when a tower is not sustainable. Purple “stress areas” will pop up if a word you made is too long and is in danger of collapsing. Naturally, the bigger the stress areas, the more likely that part will break. If you play the game with the sound on, you’ll get some audio hints as well. You can actually hear your words creaking as the stress you put on them grows larger. All of these are good indicators that you should reinforce your foundations before you continue to add more words on top of your tower.

Although you have very limited lives to play with, lives in this game, at least in the MishMash mode, don’t seem to matter much since you can keep playing on for free. I believe this might be a bug on the developers’ end since I suspect you’ll probably have to watch a video ad to keep playing, but somehow, the game simply lets you play on for free.

If you do complete a level, you’ll get to choose a treasure chest to open. You can even “invest” some of your existing coins prior to opening a chest in hopes that you’ll get much better rewards. There are apparently runestones that you can collect as well – there are 3 stones to collect for each element, namely Earth, Water, Wind and Fire. Once you get all of them, you will get a very powerful runestone called a Minhcin. Not sure what this does yet, but I expect something spectacular.

Community

WordCrafting is, unfortunately, a rather underrated word puzzle game, and as such, its community is pretty small, but considering that the game isn’t exactly the social or multiplayer sort, this probably isn’t much of an issue. However, if you do enjoy playing the game, be sure to recommend to your fellow “wordies” (word game fans).

Graphics/ Sound

In terms of graphics and sound, WordCrafting did really well in both aspects. I really like the fantasy theme of the game and how the background looks. The sound is very nuanced too – the “severity” of the creaking sounds does change depending on how likely your tower is to collapse.

Conclusion

Once in a while, I will stumble on a very much underrated word game that’s so unique, intriguing, refreshing, and challenging that it completely blows my mind (in a good way), and I’ve got to admit – WordCrafting: A Tower of Words is, without a doubt, one of these incredibly rare games.

The storyline is as interesting as its gameplay and honestly, once you get how the game works, you will find yourself spending hours on the game, trying to build a tower of words that not only can reach the next floating well but also to collect all the outlying Word of the Day letters and extra potions. The number of new words you can learn through the MishMash mode of this game is simply astounding as well.

Granted that not many wordies may enjoy a game as different as this one, especially since the game seems to focus more on building solid structures rather than testing your vocabulary (at least in the MishMash mode), WordCrafting is definitely a game that wordies simply must try. Find Games Like WordCrafting: A Tower of Words