Review by: Michele White

It seemed harmless enough. Word Puzzle sounded like an innocuous little game that would be played once and soon forgotten — or so I thought. Though very similar to puzzles that can be found at places like MSN Games, Word Puzzle is a word search game (like the books mom used to give you for long car rides when you were little) that gives up to four players the opportunity to battle it out and discover which one of them is the Puzzle King. Find the word and highlight it before your opponent does or time runs out. Score points for finding bonus and secret words, and in theory, compete with others online via the Xbox Live Arcade.

The download was quick and painless and took less than two minutes. Rated E, Word Puzzle can accommodate one or two players offline, while two to four can duke it out online via Xbox Live Arcade. At a cost of 800 marketplace points (about 10 real dollars), it isn’t a bad deal. There’s nothing exciting about the graphics, but they do an adequate job of making the visuals interesting. Obstacles to vision include a dancing native, a solar eclipse and a lightning storm that make solving the puzzle more difficult.

To play, all you need is the A button and your right thumb stick for most puzzles, although the most advanced cubic ones require both bumpers to turn the cube. There are three modes for single player operation: arcade, survival and free play. In arcade mode, you challenge yourself to make as many word combinations as you can before time runs out. Survival mode claims that you must defuse all of the bombs in order to save the eight ancient civilizations, but the bombs are really just the timer. Like arcade mode, you must simply complete all of the puzzles for each level before time runs out. The levels get progressively harder, but this mode can be beaten in less than an hour. Free play mode has no time limit, so if you just want to solve word puzzles for hours, this is the mode for you. I do recommend, however, that you turn the sound off if you’re going to play for more than 15 minutes at a sitting. The music drones on and repeats every couple of minutes, sounding much like the tinny tunes that came with the PC games of the late 1980s.

The game stopped being so innocent when we moved into multiplayer mode. We couldn’t find any takers on Xbox Live, so we decided to dual each other in offline play. This is where two players race to see who can solve the puzzle the fastest. Be careful, though, as an overactive trigger finger will cost you valuable points. It wasn’t long before my two kids were in a duel to the death — and they HATE word games. While Word Puzzle will never make my top ten favs, it’s fun for what it is, and I recommend it for any homeschoolers looking for an alternative to Friday afternoon fun books. Bonus points are awarded for pairing synonyms and antonyms, and every puzzle has a secret theme word that relates all of the other words in the puzzle together. The puzzles are available in English, French, German and Spanish, so foreign language students can get plenty of spelling and word familiarization practice.