Two minutes of vocabulary heroism
By Joel Abrams
Boston.com Staff
Reviewing: [WordHero]
By: SVEN Studios
Price: Free
Platforms: Android
Should you get it?: Yes, if you want to heroically swipe words
As the Schoolhouse Rock song about zero taught me many years ago, there are all kinds of heroes. A word hero is apparently someone who can find words in a four-by-four grid and quickly swipe them. The mind boggles at this definition.
Playing [WordHero], you test the speed of your brain and your fingers against hundreds of people around the world, all looking for as many words as possible in the same arrangement of letters.
The app puts you in a league based on your average score, so beginners don't end up competing against folks with freakishly large vocabularies. The app does validate your words against a dictionary that is quite sizable.
Game-play is simple, elegant, and polished, and the game mechanics are filled with nice touches: you can configure the color and font of the letter tiles, uncommon letters are worth more points, special boards with features like a 2-letter tile ('qu' or 'ed') get mixed in every third round, every letter on the board can be used in at least two words (and you get a nice bonus for using every letter at least twice).
The app is ad-supported, which can be distracting at times, but it's refreshingly free of any sort of upsell. Really, the worst problem is the extraneous brackets in the name, and the loose definition of heroism.
