Review: Bookworm Adventures Volume 2 [PC]
josh, 11-Aug-09 » Bookworm Adventures Volume 2 Review, by Josh
From the creators of the highly successful Plants vs Zombies comes the newest Popcap games offering, Bookworm Adventures Volume 2. For those of you not familiar with Bookworm Adventures, the player takes control of a bookworm (obviously) named Lex. The adventure part takes the form of a pseudo scrabble type game in which you have to spell a word from 9 letters you are given. The scrabble elements combine with RPG elements in which you get more points for using certain tiles or powered up letters. Battles take place with you having to spell words to attack your enemy and depending on the length of the word, the letters used, and the power tiles used more or less health is taken off your enemy. There’s a free demo if anyone isn’t quite following. Regardless of how the game plays, the basic game mechanic is this, form a word out of the 9 letters provided. If that doesn’t appeal to you, then regrettably there’s not a whole lot more I can off you and maybe you’re better off looking for another casual game, however if you are interested in spelling or you know someone who is, then read on and explore the inner workings of aggressive spelling. (It feels very wrong writing those two words together...)
The hero of this story is Lex, a large green Bookworm who has to defeat enemies from fairy tales and other mysterious book lands in order to restore peace and quiet to his library.
As I said, you take the role of Lex, a small green Bookworm who, through some magic, ends up having to go into storybooks and defeat characters from each. These range from Jack and Jill, to the cards from Alice in Wonderland, all the way to a hookah smoking caterpillar that produces smoke monsters for you to battle (what storybook that is from is still a mystery to me). Obviously the health of the enemies continues to increase as the levels pass by, but despite being very weak at the start of your adventure, you’re not left that way for very long, with a new item or helper unlocked at each end level.
You can equip two items for each stage (each stage consists of roughly 10 fights) and these can have effects anywhere from increasing damage from certain kinds of words such as adjectives, to just generally increasing damage from every term, to awarding you extra damage tiles for performing certain actions. The items stack up as you get through more levels, but the constraint of only being able to take two means that most of the time you’ll stick with the two that are most effective (for me it was the one that resisted stun and the increased damage of adjectives ftw) and only really swap them out in the event you get one that does the same thing only better.
The other helpful thing you can bring into battle with you is a companion. From what I’ve seen of my limited playing of the game, the companion effectively helps you out every set number of turns. Mother Goose for example, the first companion you get, gives you a health potion every 4 turns, which once you get into the later levels turns out to be invaluable. Another companion, the Cheshire cat, can alleviate any status effects currently harming you every 4 turns. Talking about status effects, that gets me into the “combat” of the game.
Items and companions help out immensely during the game, however the ability to only take two items and one companion makes the choices more difficult.
As I’ve said a couple of times, the “combat” is essentially a game of scrabble with more effects and better graphics. Tiles of letters that are less used carry a higher damage count, whereas the more common letters are easier to use. Occasionally you’ll come across status tiles that will add damage, restore health, or add poison to the target. For all these tiles that affect you positively, there are in fact some that make it more difficult for you to form words. Breaking tiles effectively means they do not add anything to the letter count of your words, although they do still allow you to form words with them. Another negative effect is warping the tiles, in which some of your tiles are transformed into random letters and change every turn. The most sinister of these tile effects is the tile lock, which keeps you from using it in a word for a certain number of turns.
Fun animations for your attacks add a unique bit of visual flair to the game, and reinforce some of the RPG elements.
Now, the only complaint I have about the game is about the combat itself. The story is cheesy and the dialogue is even worse, but I have a feeling I only think that because it’s not a game that is geared towards a 21 year old tech savvy male. The real gripe I have with the game is the unbalance of the attacks. I got into a situation in the later stages of play where I entered into a world with 3 of each potion (health, attack, and remove magic). Through no fault of my own, but due to the attacks of the enemies stealing my potions, I could not progress past the 7th fight. I didn’t have anything to heal myself and kept dying at the same place every time. Once you die in a world, it takes you back to the stage select show where you are given the opportunity to play a small mini game in order to get more potions and more damaging gems. You can only play the mini game once in between levels, so I would complete the game, go into the level with my 3 potions of each, have them all stolen, and end up back where I started. Regrettably, the only way to start the level again is to start from the first battle in that world, which meant the same thing kept happening over and over again. Eventually this got so frustrating that I just gave up and went back to killing things with a virtual gun as opposed to words.
The amount of damage you do is directly related to the number of letters in your word and the special effects of the gem tiles used.
Overall, I was actually quite happy to play this game. The first one was good and received positive reviews, and while this is an improvement on the first one from what I have heard, it’s still not a game I am particularly interested in. It’s good to waste some time, and it does have some catchy music and things to keep you interested in the game, but it does in fact suffer from the same problem that scrabble always has. If you don’t have a wide vocabulary then you might find this game a challenge, but if you’ve got a decent vocabulary you will be able to make it through most of the game without incident. So, would I recommend this game to a friend? I’m not entirely sure. I think its good fun to give it a go, but perhaps the demo is more worth it than the actual game. However, if you’re a real vocabulary nutter, you’ve got kids who are looking for more ways to learn more words, or if you are in fact a kid yourself, then yeah I would definitely recommend the game to those people. It’s a game that tries to do a lot of things, and while it doesn’t do any of those things spectacularly, it does make it all fun.
Final Rating: 3 out of 5 vowels
Bookworm Adventures 2 is now on sale from Popcap Games for $29.95AU: http://www.popcap.com/games/bookwormadventures2/?icid=bwa2_HP_PLARGE_PC_07_30_09_EN
Also available from steam for $19.95US:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/3630/
From the creators of the highly successful Plants vs Zombies comes the newest Popcap games offering, Bookworm Adventures Volume 2. For those of you not familiar with Bookworm Adventures, the player takes control of a bookworm (obviously) named Lex. The adventure part takes the form of a pseudo scrabble type game in which you have to spell a word from 9 letters you are given. The scrabble elements combine with RPG elements in which you get more points for using certain tiles or powered up letters. Battles take place with you having to spell words to attack your enemy and depending on the length of the word, the letters used, and the power tiles used more or less health is taken off your enemy. There’s a free demo if anyone isn’t quite following. Regardless of how the game plays, the basic game mechanic is this, form a word out of the 9 letters provided. If that doesn’t appeal to you, then regrettably there’s not a whole lot more I can off you and maybe you’re better off looking for another casual game, however if you are interested in spelling or you know someone who is, then read on and explore the inner workings of aggressive spelling. (It feels very wrong writing those two words together...)
The hero of this story is Lex, a large green Bookworm who has to defeat enemies from fairy tales and other mysterious book lands in order to restore peace and quiet to his library.
As I said, you take the role of Lex, a small green Bookworm who, through some magic, ends up having to go into storybooks and defeat characters from each. These range from Jack and Jill, to the cards from Alice in Wonderland, all the way to a hookah smoking caterpillar that produces smoke monsters for you to battle (what storybook that is from is still a mystery to me). Obviously the health of the enemies continues to increase as the levels pass by, but despite being very weak at the start of your adventure, you’re not left that way for very long, with a new item or helper unlocked at each end level.
You can equip two items for each stage (each stage consists of roughly 10 fights) and these can have effects anywhere from increasing damage from certain kinds of words such as adjectives, to just generally increasing damage from every term, to awarding you extra damage tiles for performing certain actions. The items stack up as you get through more levels, but the constraint of only being able to take two means that most of the time you’ll stick with the two that are most effective (for me it was the one that resisted stun and the increased damage of adjectives ftw) and only really swap them out in the event you get one that does the same thing only better.
The other helpful thing you can bring into battle with you is a companion. From what I’ve seen of my limited playing of the game, the companion effectively helps you out every set number of turns. Mother Goose for example, the first companion you get, gives you a health potion every 4 turns, which once you get into the later levels turns out to be invaluable. Another companion, the Cheshire cat, can alleviate any status effects currently harming you every 4 turns. Talking about status effects, that gets me into the “combat” of the game.
Items and companions help out immensely during the game, however the ability to only take two items and one companion makes the choices more difficult.
As I’ve said a couple of times, the “combat” is essentially a game of scrabble with more effects and better graphics. Tiles of letters that are less used carry a higher damage count, whereas the more common letters are easier to use. Occasionally you’ll come across status tiles that will add damage, restore health, or add poison to the target. For all these tiles that affect you positively, there are in fact some that make it more difficult for you to form words. Breaking tiles effectively means they do not add anything to the letter count of your words, although they do still allow you to form words with them. Another negative effect is warping the tiles, in which some of your tiles are transformed into random letters and change every turn. The most sinister of these tile effects is the tile lock, which keeps you from using it in a word for a certain number of turns.
Fun animations for your attacks add a unique bit of visual flair to the game, and reinforce some of the RPG elements.
Now, the only complaint I have about the game is about the combat itself. The story is cheesy and the dialogue is even worse, but I have a feeling I only think that because it’s not a game that is geared towards a 21 year old tech savvy male. The real gripe I have with the game is the unbalance of the attacks. I got into a situation in the later stages of play where I entered into a world with 3 of each potion (health, attack, and remove magic). Through no fault of my own, but due to the attacks of the enemies stealing my potions, I could not progress past the 7th fight. I didn’t have anything to heal myself and kept dying at the same place every time. Once you die in a world, it takes you back to the stage select show where you are given the opportunity to play a small mini game in order to get more potions and more damaging gems. You can only play the mini game once in between levels, so I would complete the game, go into the level with my 3 potions of each, have them all stolen, and end up back where I started. Regrettably, the only way to start the level again is to start from the first battle in that world, which meant the same thing kept happening over and over again. Eventually this got so frustrating that I just gave up and went back to killing things with a virtual gun as opposed to words.
The amount of damage you do is directly related to the number of letters in your word and the special effects of the gem tiles used.
Overall, I was actually quite happy to play this game. The first one was good and received positive reviews, and while this is an improvement on the first one from what I have heard, it’s still not a game I am particularly interested in. It’s good to waste some time, and it does have some catchy music and things to keep you interested in the game, but it does in fact suffer from the same problem that scrabble always has. If you don’t have a wide vocabulary then you might find this game a challenge, but if you’ve got a decent vocabulary you will be able to make it through most of the game without incident. So, would I recommend this game to a friend? I’m not entirely sure. I think its good fun to give it a go, but perhaps the demo is more worth it than the actual game. However, if you’re a real vocabulary nutter, you’ve got kids who are looking for more ways to learn more words, or if you are in fact a kid yourself, then yeah I would definitely recommend the game to those people. It’s a game that tries to do a lot of things, and while it doesn’t do any of those things spectacularly, it does make it all fun.
Final Rating: 3 out of 5 vowels
Bookworm Adventures 2 is now on sale from Popcap Games for $29.95AU: http://www.popcap.com/games/bookwormadventures2/?icid=bwa2_HP_PLARGE_PC_07_30_09_EN
Also available from steam for $19.95US:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/3630/
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Article Stats
| Category: | Game Reviews |
| Posted: | 11-Aug-09 2:36:25 am |
| Author: | josh |