Word Wheel by Lightwood Games is a game that could be reviewed in a paragraph or two. It’s a simple game where you’re presented with nine letters, and your goal is to make as many words as possible with those nine letters. And hey, that’s basically it – make dozens of words, then move on to another set of letters and do the same. There are no scoreboards, microtransactions, cosmetics to unlock, or even minimum requirements to move on to the next puzzle: you’re given all 100 puzzles right off the bat and can play any of them any time.
Okay, so I might not have been entirely honest. There is ONE twist to the formula – every word has to use the central letter in the wheel. In that puzzle up above, for example, every word has to use a Y. That letter can be anywhere in the word, but it HAS to be used.
The UI is super nifty – you just aim the joystick in whatever direction you want and then hit a button to select the letter. Let it return to the center to select the center letter, and you can easily submit or clear what you’ve currently got. Words are separated by length on the right and you can tab through them to see what you’ve already submitted. If you manage to enter a word that isn’t one of the words you’re looking for it’s scored under “Bonus words”.
There are two things that really make the game terrific for me: the alphabetical listing of words to find and multiplayer. I’m a huge fan of word games, but I’m far from great at them. That’s not a bad thing, mind you, I don’t have to be the best at something to enjoy it after all. But seeing the words I’ve found combined with the words that are missing in alphabetical order really helps to find more words. For example, in the image above, there has to be a word that comes between “ALES” and “ANTS”. This means the first letter is definitely A, and then the second letter has to be L or N. If it’s AL, then the next letter must be E (but ALET isn’t a word), N, R, S, or T. ALN, ALR, and ALS don’t make any sense, and while I was hoping “ALTS” was a word thanks to gamer lingo, it isn’t. This means the word must begin with AN, and with a bit of effort, I was able to figure out that it was ANTE. In other words, after you spend a while trying to find as many words as you can, you can brute force your way into finding a few more, and these may lead to thinking of other, longer words as well.
The other terrific twist on the game is in the multiplayer. Word Wheel seamlessly integrates local multiplayer into the mix, and on the Switch, I merely had to have two controllers synced to play with my gal. This mode is only as competitive as you want it to be – the game doesn’t tally how many words you’ve each found, but it does show which player found each word (see below image). If you want to be competitive, total them up after; if not, just have fun finding words together! I really liked the way the wheel functions in two-player mode as well; instead of filling in each pie piece fully, there are rings of color, and words are shown at the top and bottom to make it even easier to tell them apart.
Finally, for those who want some sort of reward, worry not! Finding the 9-letter word(s) in a puzzle will give you a glorious reward: a terrible joke! I figured out XYLOPHONE on my own, and may or may not have used a Scrabble word finder site to help me complete a couple more to see some of these jokes. Lightwood Games promised “100 groan-worthy jokes to reveal”, and from the few I’ve seen they weren’t kidding! As a fan of bad jokes, I’ve loved them all so far! The jokes are even related to the 9-letter words; the joke for finding HAPPINESS, for example, is “Statistically speaking, 6 out of 7 dwarves are not happy.” GET IT? Because only one is named Happy!
However, there is one thing I would’ve loved to have changed a little bit. The game lays out the 100 puzzles across 25 screens, and you can tell which ones you’ve completed: if you’ve found the 9-letter words, the middle letter is colored purple, and if you find all the words the whole ring is purple. I really would’ve liked a visual indicator in between, such as filling in one pie piece for every 12.5% of the words found (1/8). This would make it so much easier to see which puzzles have been worked on at a glance! You’re shown how many you’ve found in the text below the image, sure, but for some reason it’s so much harder to see the text when quickly scrolling through screens.
This one little complaint is far from enough to stop me from recommending the game. It’s approachable with lots of content and even a great multiplayer mode that supports up to four players according to the Nintendo Switch store page. The controls are intuitive and the bad jokes are perfectly bad. Word puzzle lovers should definitely add this to their collections! The same goes for trophy collectors; PlayStation players can earn 33 trophies (including a platinum trophy!) here with a quick trip to an anagram solving site if they don’t want to put in the work themselves.
Word Wheel is available on Nintendo Switch (reviewed), PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, and iOS.
A review code was provided for this review.
