The App Shelf for iPhone and iPod touch
Top Shelf Apps for week of July 27, 2010New apps added every Tuesday! |
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Reviews
Video Review: Boggle Attempts to Shake Things Up
Price: $2.99
App Store Link: Full / No Lite Version
Verdict: Like it
Replay Value: Very High
Pros: A very well made word game app with a couple new twists.
Cons: Boggle doesn’t have much to offer that we haven’t already seen in other, cheaper word apps.
Bottom Line: EA’s Boggle is a solid word game, with a few cool extra features. If you already own a lot of similar word games, Boggle probably won’t have much to offer you. If you’re a word game fanatic or simply haven’t found the “right one” yet, Boggle is definitely worth a look.
Well, it’s about time. Over a year after the launch of the App Store, the classic word game Boggle has officially graced the iPhone with its presence. Overall, Boggle is a fairly polished word game app; unfortunately for EA, it may be too little, too late.
For those not familiar, the concept of Boggle is fairly straightforward. Players shake and roll a set of alphabet dice into a 4 by 4 square grid. Players then have 3 minutes to make as many word combinations as possible from the grid by connecting surrounding letters.
The app is exactly what you might expect from a Boggle app developed by EA. Polished graphics, fun gameplay, great replay value, and you even get to physically shake up the alphabet dice. Of course, when it comes to word games, none of these features are new to the iPhone OS, so let’s talk about what sets Boggle apart from other word apps.
First, Boggle offers a new advanced mode. In this mode, whenever a player discovers a new word (by dragging or tapping over the desired letters), the first and last letter switch places on the grid. While this might sound like a small detail, this new dynamic can actually add a lot of strategy to the game. It vastly increases the number of possible word choices and forces players to plan their moves in advance if they want to maximize their score.
To keep things interesting, the app also features a challenge mechanic, which allows players to send, receive, and keep track of challenges based off any game board they play, as well as a list of track-able achievements, such as longest word, most frequently used letter, etc.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure these few new features will be enough for Boggle to compete with the cheaper, similar, and more experienced titles already for sale by smaller independent developers.
