Highrise Heroes: Word Challenge

« Highrise Heroes is an outstanding word game that delivers a compelling adventure that is a must have iOS experience. »

« Highrise Heroes has a single significant flaw, however; its in-game dictionary is poor, and sometimes doesn’t recognize valid words. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s worth noting. »

« A largely entertaining word game, with some great ideas, but it bangs on a bit towards the end. »

« Bejeweled meets Scrabble in this excellent puzzle game. But it's more than that: each level has survivors placed in it, and your goal is to clear enough blocks, by creating words with them, to let each survivor reach the bottom of the screen. There's even a plot that unfolds as your protagonist descends the ****, meeting with other survivors and finding clues about why the building is collapsing in the first place. The levels have different layouts, as well, filled with obstacles such as rock (destroyed by matching adjacent blocks multiple times), fire (needs to be cleared twice and spreads to other blocks), and conveyor belts (slides all blocks and survivors in the row to the side). Some levels mix up the formula as well, such as needing to match every letter in the alphabet, make matches that include bananas (for the chimpanzee survivor, of course), or even replace the letters with numbers and require you to add them up to reach a certain total. There are over a hundred levels, but I never got bored getting a 3-star score on each, and am even going back to complete the special "banana" challenges in some of the levels (such as forming an 8-letter word or a palindrome). The obstacles in each level are the same every time you play it, but the letters are random, so there's no one "perfect" solution to find. The Android version has some bonus levels as well. Two minor caveats, though. First, the difficulty level is kind of swingy. Some very late levels are quite easy and can be completed, with a 3-star score, in literally two five-letter words. There are, however, some extremely difficult levels that took me many tries to get 3 stars. Most notable are the levels where you have a time limit instead of a limited number of turns; these timers are -very- short, and you'll get a 3-star score only if you spot long words or ones with multiple score multipliers very quickly. Second, the game's dictionary is a bit odd. It's missing several words that aren't all that uncommon, has a few modern internet lingo words but not others, and even contains a handful of proper names. It's very frustrating to spend a survivor's special ability or some precious time to create a word that the game inexplicably doesn't recognize. Those are minor issues, though. If you enjoy spelling games, I can't recommend Highrise Heroes highly enough. »