I spotted a real sight for sore eyes amongst the scores of newly released iPhone apps this morning – TextTwist Turbo. Text Twist is a game I’ve always enjoyed tons – a real classic word game that’s been hugely popular on PC and mobile platforms for years. And I’ve not seen it before now on the iPhone, though I’ve seen many similar games.
If you’re a Text Twist fan, or if you just like word puzzle / word guessing games. you’ll likely be very glad to see this game has made its way to the App Store. Some very quick first impressions and more screencaps after the jump …
TextTwist Turbo offers two modes of play: Basic Puzzle (the classic version of the game) and Twist Puzzle, where you swap adjacent letters by tapping between them and rearrange them to form words. I’ve taken only a quick look at the Twisted Puzzle so far and mostly played the Basic Puzzle mode.
In Basic mode you create 3 to 7 letter words by rearranging the scrambled letters. The longer the word you enter, the more points you’re awarded. You finish levels by figuring out words that use all the available letters, or by gaining enough points.
There are a few things that are a bit different / odd about this first version of TextTwist Turbo. The first one is that you can play the game in landscape mode only – I find this strange, and would prefer to have an option to play in portrait.
Another thing that surprises me is that there is no timer in the game. That was always a big part of the fun with Text Twist – racing against the clock to figure out a long enough word to make it to the next level. Again, I’d like to be able to choose to use a timer or not. In fact, options are just very sparse all the way around – another example is that the game has some music and sound effects which, although they’re not too horrific, I would still like to be able to shut off.
One last element that seems strange to me is that the game keeps track of high scores, but never prompts you for a name / nickname – so the listing of these is pretty drab …
TextTwist Turbo lets you save your game, so when you close out and come back into it, you can choose to start a new game or continue an existing one. The game looks a bit flashier (if a word game can ever be remotely flashy) than other versions of it I’ve seen.
Like most word games, there is not much to gameplay – but the app works well and is easy to use.
I’m very happy to see TextTwist on the iPhone, and I hope we’ll see some updates to it and a few more options added soon …
Continue reading:
- Everything New Apple Just Announced (Septembe
- Apple Watch Pre-Order
- Apple Research Kit launches with 5 Apps
- Apple TV now only $69
TAGS: iphone apps, iPhone word games
