Back in April, I reviewed Word Search by POWGI for Shigeru Reviews. I enjoyed the game quite a bit! I've always loved words and writing, so a game like Word Search really spoke to me. Now, the same developer as that game has created a new game called the Epic Word Search Collection. It comes out on July 23 and this game is strictly for the 3DS. It should be another winner right?
Epic Word Search Collection is a huge game; its much bigger than Word Search by POWGI. There are multiple categories in the game and within each category are subcategories. There are basically puzzles for everyone here. The topics range from TV, Movies, Sports, Food, and Rock Music. I love TV, Movies, and Music, so those were my favorite categories. But I imagine there will be plenty of fans of food and sports too. You could definitely play this game for a long time. Thankfully, unlike its predecessor, the game saves where you are at in the game and you come back and find more words later. This is very handy. Epic Word Search is a hard game and you'll want to take breaks from it. POWGI was an easier game that I'd recommend to novices or casual fans, while Epic Word is more for hardcore word search fans. I wish, though, that I could say that the experience was perfect; its not.
My least favorite part of Epic Word Search is the way scrolling is handled in the game. The word search areas are gigantic and you'll have to scroll left, right, up, and down to find words. This makes it more challenging, but the challenge isn't the problem here. No, the problem with scrolling is that the analog stick and D-Pad have inverted controls. So up is down, down is up, left is right, and right is left. This makes scrolling a bit confusing and its easy to get lost while trying to solve a puzzle. There is no way to change the inverted controls and there is no option to scroll using the stylus. The scrolling doesn't destroy the Epic Word Search experience, but its definitely something I wish was better. The best solution to going to a another category or going back to the one you were at is to push A for the overview mode. Overview mode is pretty easy to use. In fact, the menus overall in the game are really good. I also thought that the touch screen word searching worked just as well as POWGI. Aside from the scrolling, Epic Word Search Collection is a well designed game.
This game has more musical variety than POWGI, but I don't like the songs as much. All of the songs in this game are piano based and on an infinite loop. Thats ok at first but can become annoying. Thankfully, there is an option to turn the music off and leave the sound effects on. The sounds are fine. They sound a lot like POWGI's.
Epic Word Search Collection is a good game. Yes, the scrolling and music in the game could have been better, but everything else is pretty good. As I said earlier, I only recommend this game to people that are hardcore word search fans. If you're a more casual word search fan, you should check out Word Search by POWGI. In any case, both games are good and I look forward to what the developer does next!
My Score: 7.8/10
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Thank you to the developer, Lightwood Games, for providing me with a review copy of the game! You can check the game out for yourself tomorrow (July 23) on the 3DS eshop!
All of the above pictures were taken from google here.
Hi Daniel
ReplyDeleteThanks for the review, and your feedback on scrolling is very useful. We've had other comments saying the same thing and we're already planning to patch the game so you can switch which way the movement works.
While testing, we tried both directions and thought the way it's currently done (left to move the grid left) seemed the most natural. Looking for confirmation, we discovered that Nintendo's own Cross Words Plus game works the same way. Their game includes puzzles that scroll, although much smaller ones than ours, so it's unlikely to have been such an issue for players who felt it was backwards.