Wordtouch

Wordtouch is as affable as it is affordable. This kind of challenging yet lightweight brainteaser is bread and butter gaming for the handheld generation. It's one of those applications you'll leave on your iPhone permanently, returning to it every time you feel like a bit of a neuron stretching.

There are instructions (something too many iPhone game developers seem to be completely and willfully ignoring), but if you need them you're unlikely to find much use for a word game like this anyway. We've still got about 400 words to fritter away in this review, however, (watch it - ed) so read on while you set the game downloading onto your iPhone.

The screen displays a 12x6 grid, each square filled with a letter and a point value. Essentially you can (and undoubtedly will) think of these as Scrabble pieces, although the scores on the letters are a little more random to ensure you apply a some literary strategy during play. The challenge is to make as many words (of three letters or more) from the mass of letters as you can, ideally emptying the screen or leaving as few remaining pieces as possible once there are no more words available.

You can only select the top row of 12 letters, however, and these are moved to the blank space at the top of the screen as you build your word. When a letter disappears from the top row, the pieces below it automatically move up to fill the gap; making the next letter in the column available. Depleting an entire column grants a multiplier bonus for the word that successfully emptied it, and as the board nears the end, some pretty decent scores can be racked up very quickly.

And that's about it, though we don't intend to suggest this makes for shallow gameplay. The way in which the letters move in Wordtouch demands some lateral thinking to really rack up the big points. A high-scoring letter can be wasted on a short word, so thinking ahead is vital. Bringing the pieces you need to the top in order to spell out a longer word can mean thinking up small phrases simply to shift obstacles out of the way. After a couple of games, this kind of strategising becomes key, and Wordtouch reveals itself to be something of a formidable and provoking puzzler.

For all the depth of gameplay it has, Wordtouch could stand to broaden its scope with additional features. Offering just one game mode seems a little dry these days, and a timed or endless mode would have expanded upon the core concept adequately. Hopefully these are introductions we'll see in one of the many trademark App Store updates our iPhones seem to be inundated with, but in the meantime there's plenty to enjoy in the sole available mode.

Okay, that's about 500 words. Now go play the game.