You
hear laughter cracking through the walls. It sends you spinning, you
have no choice...
Scrabble gets an attack of the
Harry Potters in this combination of RPG and word nerd nirvana.
You’re the wizard, charged with using your magic to conjure
words from a platter of 10 letters per level, aiming to take down
all manner of attacking gremmies and pocket coinage. The bigger the
word that you can make, the more oomph the resultant attack directs
towards said assailants. Ply them with a bunch of three-letter words
and you’ll quickly be endeadinated.
Win a round and you’ll
head one floor up the 100-level spire. Lose and, well, wrong... do
it again. Beat those 100 and you may start feeling a little down...
but in a good way.
The RPG side of things involves levelling
up your robes and hats and such as you charge further upwards. It
gets very hard to beat anything even slightly more advanced without
spending requisite shekels to improve your wizardiness.
Spellspire is certainly enjoyable, but it does suffer from the same
malaise that any word game does – the word part of proceedings. Most
anybody aside from a Scrabble savant will have absolutely
NFI WTF half the words that the game expects actually are. Respect
for accepting saltier words which similar games go all prude upon,
but many will just get frustrated at being unable to proceed despite
possessing a perfectly cromulent vocabulary. Admittedly though,
devs are damned if they do and damned if they don’t here.
Ultimately, if you fancy yourself as a bit of a word-spinner then
you’ll likely derive quite some fun out of Spellspire. But
if you possess all the verbal alacrity of the current US president
then you’ll likely deem this a fake game.
Whatever. Following
the footsteps of a rag doll dance, we are entranced.
