Wordaholic

 After enjoying a number of maths based games I decided to try some word based games and downloaded Wordaholic. I was hoping that this would be just as addictive as things like Mathgame, Math Maniac and the excellent The King of OX though was left sadly under-whelmed by this for some reason.

The game sees you making words from the letters in the honeycomb like structure that can see below. Each of the letters has a number on it that corresponds to the score you get for using it in scrabble (Z=10, A=1, J=8 etc) and the idea is that you try to build the biggest score you can with all your words added together. In principle this sounds fun and set against a clock it should be frantic and really, really good fun.

The games big flaw comes in with it's "reward" system. For every 5 words you create you get a bonus 15 seconds on all 3 of the games timed modes (Normal, Lightning and Chaos) although this is a good idea in principle it leads to a big flaw with the game. The ability to create endless strings of 2 letter words. Using the image to the right you can create a number of very quick and easy 2 letter words (things such as "aw", "it", "de", "da", "to", "ho", "aa" and "he" amongst many others) to in essence give you unlimited time. Whilst it's nice to be rewarded it turns what should be a quick and addictive game into a real slog to try and put your name on the leaderboard (or should that be leader bored?).

The huge flaw in the game is the worst part though the graphics don't do anything amazing and won't blow you away either. Oddly the game, which played fine 12 hours ago, now seems to be plagued by yet another, much more serious problem, repeated Force Close screens after pressing "Submit".

Addictiveness-4/10 When it was working it was flawed, fun but very flawed
Controls-7/10 They do their job but feel a little bit off at times
Graphics-4/10 Uninspiring and unexciting
Sounds-0/10 Silence means a score of 0* (At least it seems like silence, the game is now crashing before I get to test)
Originality-3/10 Similar, in a way, to Boggle and boggle clones so it's nothing original though it's still a nice idea to put onto the phones.

Total score 18/50

The combinations of the Force Close screens and the games "big flaw" has seen me actually uninstall the game as it's broken. Our rule on "broken" games is that they are automatically given an F. Oddly when the game was working fine I'd have given it a D+ as it's acceptable but boring and the "flaw" kills the game's sense of urgency addictiveness.

Game mark F
This game has been inducted into our Hall of Shame