Game Reviews

Spellspire - Tower is a five letter word

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iOS
| Spellspire
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Spellspire - Tower is a five letter word
|
iOS
| Spellspire

Spellspire is a casual action RPG with a difference. Instead of mashing out attacks with combinations of button presses, here you're using your vocabulary to take down monstrous assailants.

And it's nowhere near as dull as it sounds. In fact it's one of the most interesting implementations of Scrabble-with-a-twist that I've seen on the App Store for a while.

It's not without its flaws, and if you strip it down to bare bones it is a bit of a grind, but you're still going to have an awful lot of wordy fun while you play it.

You're casting spells then?

Well, yes, that's the pun. It's a pretty good pun as well. You're a wizard tromping across the screen, beset my fierce but adorable monsters. You've got a grid of letters and you need to make words out of them.

The longer the word, the more powerful the spell you create. There are a handful of beasts to defeat in each level, and you need to knock them out before a dial fills up and they take an attack.

If you're defeated you lose a life, and once you're out of lives you need to wait for them to regenerate.

There are boss challenges that see you coming up against tougher foes, and you'll often have to head back to earlier levels to complete them again in order to earn stars and coins to spend on new equipment.

And all-in-all it's an awful lot of fun. There's a bounce to the play that keeps you pushing on, and while you're rarely actually paying attention to the monsters you're fighting, they're pretty darn well designed.

Upping your stats with new loot gives you a reason to keep pushing on, and there's something genuinely cathartic about hitting a level you struggled with the first time round when you're a powered-up super linguist.

This sounds like a right lark

It is. Like I say, there's an element of grind here, but since you're concentrating on the letters rather than, well, anything else, it never really feels like it.

And when you bash out a seven letter word and take out a stream of creatures you can't help but do a little dance of joy. Or maybe that's just me.

Spellspire pushes the word game genre in some interesting directions, and the addition of RPG elements turns it into a compulsive and engaging time-eating experience.

Spellspire - Tower is a five letter word

Spellspire chucks enough ideas at the word game to make it an entertaining diversion
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.