It's a world of adventure, where you get deal damage with the words that you spell.

I have a kind of love/hate relationship with the game company Popcap.  I say this because I absolutely love the games they make, but I hate the amount of time that said games steal from my life.  The most recent offering from Popcap, Bookworm Adventures 2 continues this trend.  Plants vs. Zombies set a very high bar for “casual” games. So can a bookworm hope to leap it? In some ways yes.

When I was first explaining the concept of Bookworm Adventures Volume 2 to a coworker, they got a little confused.  Like any adversarial game, there are adversaries to conquer, in Bookworm you do damage with words.  My coworker thought that meant you were supposed to use hurtful words to vanquish the enemy.  While that may be an excellent idea, it’s not exactly on target.  In Bookworm, you deal damage in the same way you score points in Scrabble (sans the double and triple word scores).  Just like in Scrabble, you have a tile set to spell your words from.  In Bookworm, you get 16 letters and the longer the word you spell, the more damage you will do.  For instance, a word like pretentiously, is going to do a lot of damage.  Some letters deal more damage than others, just like some letters score more points in Scrabble.

What's the best word you can spell using those tiles?

So, can spelling be fun? Absolutely.  Some of the fun is from the verbal taunting you take from the opponents you face.  Take Too Hot Porridge to the left there.  He’s like cold porridge, but hot.  When you’re playing in adventure mode, all of the villains have a theme. You’ll run through Cold Porridge, Too Hot Porridge, Baby Bear, Mama Bear and Papa bear in Chapter 5’s GoldieLex and 3 bears.

The opponents that you go up against get progressively harder.  They’ll have more hit points than you and they’ll don armor.  The attacks that they send your way will also get more brutal.  They can change your tiles, set them on fire, lock them down and all sorts of other attacks.  Maybe you thought you had the tiles to spell visualize, but if your v-tile gets changed to a qu-tile then you’re not going to be able to spell what you thought you were.

When you spell using gem letters you deal bonus damage. If you use 3 gems, you get a wild card gem.

While your enemies attacks and defenses get upgraded, yours can too.  For instance, when you spell longer words you get rewarded with tile gem upgrades.  Those gem upgrades may just be a damage increase, but some gems deal lasting damage or even knock out your opponent for a turn.  Additionally, if you spell a word using three different colored gems, then you’ll be rewarded with a special wild card.  It’s essentially the equivalent of your empty tile in Scrabble, giving you the ability to use it as any letter to complete the word you want to spell.  In the example on the right, I used it as the S in “whereabouts.”  In Bookworm you can only have one wild card gem at a time, so there’s no hoarding of them to make a 16-letter killer like semiprofessional.

Now, when you’re playing the adventure mode, it might be tough to not use a solver to help you decimate the competition.  The fascination with using 10 and 12-letter words to obliterate your enemies.  But I urge you to take heart, and resist the temptation.  Oh who am I kidding, go wild, spell words like tonsillectomy and vanquish your foes in a wild display of amazingness (Bookworm does not accept my spelling of amazingness as a valid word).  Throughout the course of the game you’ll also get powerups, in the form of healing potions, damage increases, and purification potions.  The purification potions come in handy because they take care of all of the things your enemy may throw at you.  For instance, if you have a tile that’s being warped every turn, or if it’s locked down and you can’t use it, the purification potion will take care of that.  Health Potions are pretty straight forward, if you’re low on health and don’t want to die, use one.  You can also add some power to your attacks with the damage increase power up.

Destroyed! He didn't see the word coming that killed him.

Now, if a word that you spell is particularly damaging, you can kill your opponent in one-shot.  Later in the game, your words have to become even more deadly than you’d have ever imagined at the start.  Words like Squash will not send your foes packing when they’re armored to the teeth, that’s when you’ve got to break out hyperkinesis (provided you’ve got the proper tiles).

Maybe this wasn’t intended by the developers, but one of my favorite parts of the game, once I gave in to the dark side of using a solver, was to see how large the word I could spell was. Sadly, I never was able to use all 16 tiles, I guess I’ll have to call myself a word apprentice, instead of a wordsmith.

There’s a lot to be done in Bookworm Adventures, outside of the adventure mode.  Once you complete it, you’ll gain access to Arena Modes and Mini-Games.  The Mini-Games consist of Mutant Words, Golden Coins, Word Up!, Link-N-Spell, Letter Rip! and Word Master.

They make it harder to cheat during the minigames by blacking out your tiles.

You get your first taste of the Mini-Games during the campaign from the helpful Moxie. During Adventure Mode, the better you fare in the mini-game, the better your reward.  Outside of the Adventure, you’re just playing to best your previous high score.

In the Arena Mode, every boss that you’ve fought through the campaign comes back to roost in a way that’s much more intense. There are no turns, but rather each boss attacks after a cooldown.  You get bonuses for attacking first, but it’s an intense affair the entire time.

One of the important aspects of the games Popcap makes is the replayability.  I find myself consistently coming back to Plants vs. Zombies because it has that unique quality of destroying zombies with an army of plants.  Only part of that magic is found in Bookworm Adventures.  I thoroughly enjoy the adventure mode, and playing through it to get to see the next boss and the next level ate up time like playing Civilization.  But when the missions were over, and I was sitting on the menu screen, it wasn’t the same going into the arena or playing the minigames.  They’re still fun, and I will certainly play the campaign again, but what it really leaves me wanting is Volume 3.  But maybe that’s the point.  I really have nothing bad to say about the game… except that it ends.  It’s a fantastic adventure, one I certainly enjoyed playing.  You can pick it up directly from Popcap, and it’s also available on Steam and other places.  You can also pick up a demo of the game to get your linguistic feet wet.

(Oh, and yes, that headline is intentionally spelled untie, instead of unite, I thought it’d be funny.)

Any questions about the game or about the blog?  Leave a comment below or shoot me an email at matt(dot)schuler(at)woodtv(dot)com.  For shorter, quicker updates follow me on Twitter.

Quitter.

The boss battles are fearsome.

The level layouts are pretty nice.

I would not listen to that horse.