Bookworm Deluxe
Developed by PopCap Games, Inc.
Bookworm Deluxe is a popular PopCap casual puzzle game where you create words on a grid of falling letters. This is one of the earliest iterations of the Bookworm series and thus is a bit lacking in features and gameplay. While this is a casual game, be prepared for long games as the difficulty curve is very slow and takes a long time to build up to any real challenge in my opinion. The game does still feature the option to save progress so you can leave the game off and pick it up at a later time.
For the uninitiated, the gameplay of Bookworm Deluxe is pretty simple. You match up letters to create words of a minimum of 3 letters to destroy them on the grid and cause more to fall. There are two modes, one of which gives you an infinite timer and another which causes you to think fast on your feet. Creating big words causes the spawning of colored tiles that give you bonus points and upon so many points you go up a rank and the game gets a little bit harder. The harder the game, the more burning tiles that spawn and if one of these falls to the bottom of the screen you fail. Each move you make it burns through one more tile and becomes one step closer to the bottom upon which it will engulf the library in flames and the game is over.
My major issue with this game is how the gameplay is far too easy and the curve makes the game take a long time. My first game lasted about 50 minutes and I was bored to death by the end of it just wanting to fail. This game is just way too repetitive for my tastes and the way it approaches the creation of words takes out any from of difficulty. You can just drag your mouse over random letters until it shows that your selection is an actual word. This caused a lot more of me doing trial and error and playing bizarre three letter words that I don’t know the meaning of in order to clear out burning tiles. Sometimes the game gives you definitions on screen which can make it have a hint of educational purpose, but it might be more fun to just read a dictionary. I know a lot of my problems with this game just have to do with how old it is and how it was a different time upon it’s release. It seems like some of these issues have been addressed with more recent versions of the game, but this is the one I ended up playing. I assumed the word deluxe meant an enhanced version, but this is extremely barebones. Bookworm Deluxe does have a timed mode which is a bit more fun than the default mode and I highly suggest playing that one if you are decide to play this.
Visually, there’s nothing impressive at all about this game. It’s minimalistic and the audio is incredibly generic. I guess if you’ve played a PopCap games, this is pretty standard as a lot of them are also made for mobile platforms, but there’s nothing special worth seeing here. If you’re hoping for different modes and resolutions, other than full screen and windowed modes, you get nothing else. This game runs at such a low resolution that Steam notifications would block out a large percentage of my screen. Really what I would like out of this game is either a penalty for creating non-words or just more varied modes or achievements so there is something to work with other than a local high score list.
I just really didn’t enjoy this game at all. The concept seems to be perfect for some folks as I see on Steam people have tons of hours invested in this, but for me I’m never going back to playing it. It just felt way too boring for me. If you’re in to this style game, I’d suggest just getting it on some sort of mobile platform. It seems much more situated for it. Playing it with a mouse isn’t much fun and a touch screen device would probably be a bit less clunky. I can’t recommend this and if you must play it, try to find a newer iteration.
For the boring statistics part of this game, I played it for 1 hour and 2 minutes and completed one looooong game of classic mode and one quick game of action mode.
braktheman 