Game Review: Word Arena

In case you haven't noticed, we like word games. Z-Games Studio's Word Arena is yet another competitive word game that pits players against one another online. They were gracious enough to send us a copy of the game early before Word Arena's official release to the Marketplace later tonight and we've been putting the competitive word game through its paces. Find out what we thought of it after the break.

The Basics
For anyone who's played either Wordament or Wordrix's online component, we think you'll find yourselves right at home playing Z-Games' latest. The game is Boggle for the mobile internet age, where players compete worldwide for glory. The game itself is a 4x4 grid of letters arranged randomly and you drag your finger across adjacent letters to string together a word. Any word you find gets you points, and the more complex or obscure the word is the more points you get. Sounds easy, but add in the two-minute time limit and the fact that you're competing against everyone in the world and you better be ready to throw the gloves off.

Where Word Arena differentiates itself from other games is in its multiplayer-centric features. While you can't play users head to head, you can interact with other players quite a bit while playing on the international battlefield. Adding friends is easily done by highlighting their name at the end of each game. Then the game will keep track of them and you can compare scores with the global leaderboards or just with the Friends leaderboard. The game includes 'Messages', a player-to-player chat that users can contact each other with while in-game. Messages also support push notifications to let you know when you've received a new message if you're out of the game.

It looks like a version 3.0 product instead of version 1.0

The Good
There's the expression, "You never get a second chance to make a first impression", and fortunately for Word Arena it won't have to worry about any of that. What really wowed us was the beautiful production quality of the game; it looks like a version 3.0 product instead of version 1.0. The main menu features slick animations with an always-moving background, and even picks up on your phone's accent color to create a matching look. When you tap on items the letters are highlighted just like they are in-game, or if you tap on icons they highlight and quickly fade with the rest of the screen as it transitions to the next area. The little things go a long way to make that memorable first impression, and that's one area where Word Arena triumphs. We're also surprised by just how natural the gameplay feels. Word Arena is fast and the game is immediately intuitive. We also love the offline 'Practice' mode which lets us addicts build our vocabulary without the stress of a time limit (time can be added as you play) or by using our precious data plans.

All of those are great features, but our true excitement for Word Arena are its amazing community features. While none are revolutionary, the Messages player-to-player chat is a killer feature in our opinion. Having chat in an online-oriented game is the most obvious feature move to take and yet we still love its implementation here. It keeps track of all of your friends and you tap on their names to see a short conversation view. Then you just type and send whatever you want. It's simple, easy, and truly the best feature of the game despite having a Beta label attached to it.

Word Arena definitely won't be winning any originality awards.

The Bad
Word Arena is an incredibly nice product for being version 1.0, but thats hardly a surprise when you take a glance at reigning word-game champ Wordament. It's undeniable that the game is almost a carbon copy of You vs. the Internet's popular game and Word Arena definitely won't be winning any originality awards. Also despite how fast it generally feels, there's still a few areas where Word Arena is obviously a little undercooked. The most noticeable issue is when you're playing the game online and new ads begin to load. On slower data connections we noticed a few seconds of lag while ads were loading which temporarily froze the game and therefore affected our time limit. We also noticed that the Results page was extremely laggy in some cases when switching between the categories of common words, uncommon words, and words found. Finally, the hardest thing Word Arena will have to overcome is the fact that no one is playing it yet. The game feels very empty at the moment and that's because it's a format that thrives when a community surrounds it. For now Word Arena doesn't have that and they may need to be aggressive if they plan to get users to play it when so many are already invested in Wordament.

Conclusion
Z-Games Studios has turned out an impressive new addition to the online word game category that improves upon a successful formula in almost every single way. Word Arena does get penalized for its lack of originality and obviously needs to gain traction in order to have more than just a handful of players, but the game is of such great quality that we find it hard to complain about much else. The Messages feature is one we could really see as the game's best selling point--it really turns an otherwise solo experience into an effective group one. All in all we highly recommend you check out Word Arena. It may not have the crowd yet, but there's a solid foundation which it can grow upon and we can't wait to see that happen.

Note: You vs. the Internet, developers of Wordament, contacted us earlier today to request removal of this review due to a possible legal issue surrounding their intellectual property rights. However we have decided to republish the review with some revisions. But we will still comply with You vs. the Internet's concerns and therefore we will not be directly linking to the game. Sorry for the inconvenience.