Lex

Lex is what you'd end up with if you smashed Scrabble into Super Hexagon.

It's all about creating words from a small selection of letters, but at the kind of speed that makes you forget everything you've ever learned. It's a brutal, punishing ordeal, but one that's almost impossible to put down.

The game starts simply enough, deviously lulling you into a false sense of security. You're given nine Scrabble-style tiles, each with a number identifying its value.

You tap out a word, tap the tick button, and it's submitted. You're given a score and any gaps are filled with new tiles. Rinse and repeat.

But any notion of composure is speedily obliterated by Lex's timer and multiplier. As you submit a word, a bar jolts across the top of the screen. When it's full, your multiplier increases, boosting your chance of higher scores.

Simultaneously, each tile fills with red at a rate directly related to its value. So vowels, worth one point, fill up quickly. An F, which is worth four points, will fill at a quarter of the speed.

Should any single tile end up entirely red, your game comes to an end.

That point doesn't take long to reach. 40 seconds in you'll be confronted with a 5x multiplier and a game no longer content to let you think. Seconds later, you'll be at 6x, 7x or beyond, juggling letters and frantically clearing vowels.

Hesitate, or misspell a single entry, and it's game over. Any thought of laying down longer words (the minimum is three, and the bonuses start when you use five tiles or more) rapidly goes out of the window.

For the most part it's an intoxicating experience. It's also a harsh look at how you fare under pressure.

You might be some kind of Scrabble genius, but when you're in a frenzied bid for survival, 9 tiles rapidly filling with red, it's easy for every three-letter construction to depart your brain.

Some words never made it into Lex in the first place. The odd Britishism is absent, and the game is something of a puritan too, blocking words it considers rude.

When you're in the zone, and Lex blocks a valid word, it's infuriating. Presumably, someone yelled "think of the children!" during development, but it's hard to imagine little Timmy and Jane suddenly embarking on a life of crime after putting some rude words in a mobile game.

Lex can sometimes seem too brutal, and it ramps up the difficulty level extremely quickly. That's plainly intentional, and it does at least provide an alternative entry method (double-tap your final letter to submit) that gives you a fighting chance when battling higher multipliers.

Still, a second, slightly less daunting difficulty level could have opened the game up to a wider audience.

As it is, Lex is a tense, addictive, and fresh take on the word game genre. And on a large screen in particular, it's hugely enjoyable.

Sure, it's tough, but it's hard not to smile as it puts you through the wringer, spits you out with only 500 points to your name, and goads you to have just one more go.