Word Bird Review

It’s funny, I’ve never had a taste for physical word games (i.e. word games that require a board or something) and yet I really enjoy video games that do pretty much the same thing. Granted I tend to prefer word games that add bizarre elements such as RPG leveling and the like a bit more, but I tend to enjoy them regardless. Word Bird fit into this profile quite well, and as a bonus it’s been exceedingly addictive for me.

The basics of Word Bird are pretty similar to Boggle. A grid full of letters is spread out on the screen, and it’s the player’s job to find words among all the noise. Letters can connect horizontally, vertically, diagonally, forwards, and backwards, so long as they’re only one tile away from each other. Using more letters for a word means a larger multiplier, naturally. Each tile has a coin (or possibly a gem) over it initially, and using the letter on that tile collects the coin and adds to the overall score. The catch is that only so many turns are available, but by earning enough points more turns can be acquired and the cycle continues. On top of all this, each board/page has an assortment of yellow tiles (instead of green) that will bestow a large coin bonus once they’re all cleared off.

It keeps going. The classic mode is fun all by itself, as players will have a very small number of turns allowed to clear a single board. Of course more points earn more turns, so it’s possible, but it can be a challenge. Supreme Mode (the main game) is kind of the same thing, only instead of a single board it just keeps going. And instead of a small initial turn count players are granted far more turns but they all carry over between pages. In addition to that, special rules can be unlocked and turned on - such as hidden exploding tiles that collect all coins in a 3X3 grid once triggered - to make each game even more interesting. There’s even a Daily Challenge that helps to make Word Bird even more difficult to stop playing.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Word Bird. The basic game is more than enough fun for any word-loving iOS user but that’s barely the tip of this particular iceberg. The Daily Challenges offer a reason to play once a day at the very least, and the Supreme Mode is just fantastic. This is the kind of game that other people see being played, ask about the name, then end up downloading for themselves.