Wordhunters (PS4)
When I think of word games like word searches, crosswords, and anagrams, they always seem more like solitary affairs meant for a person to ponder over as a way to pass the time. They can certainly be done as a group and some word games like Boggle and Scrabble are competitive board games, but Wordhunters takes the formulas for even the solo word games and tries to retool them into a party game you can play through your phone.
Wordhunters is part of the PlayLink series of games, meaning that its multiplayer is not accessed through owning multiplayer PlayStation 4 controllers but instead pulling out a smart device and using that as your tool for playing the game. Wordhunters is purely a multiplayer experience, meaning if you can’t get a few people together it’s a disc without anything to do, but the app that you download to play it does have two games you can play on your phone even if you don’t own the game. Anagram Solver is a simple challenge to take a set of scrambled letters and rearrange them into a recognizable English word and Find the Letters shows you a word you then need to assemble from a set of scrambled letters in a small time frame. These have various difficulties and goals to shoot for but are very simplistic and probably wouldn’t even hold your attention better than grabbing an app with similar ideas but less time pressure.
The Wordhunters app, which currently seems to be available on the iOS store but not the Google Play Store, is best served as the controller for the actual Wordhunters game. In the disc version of the game, up to 6 players will compete against each other to assemble their own unique four letter word only they know thanks to it being displayed on their device’s screen. To get the letters involves winning a word game, but the letters you get for a victory tie into the game’s world traveling theme. Each round of a longer play session involves a plane taking off to one of twenty recognizable real world cities, and while the actual location is just a nice little diorama of some recognizable landmarks and appropriate structures with some city specific music playing, the name of the city is the most important part. The winner of a round gets to take one letter from the city’s name and put it into their secret word, sometimes even able to gain a big advantage if the chosen letter appears multiple times like the two A’s in the word “data”.
Thus, heading to a city that will help you out is important to gaining ground. There is a small voting session before each round on where to go next, but there are also little interference cards players can gather to do things like send the plane off course to a random city or get more time for the word game ahead to increase their chance of winning it. Besides words with double letters there usually does seem to be a pretty good balance between city availability and the kind of words you’re given, and since many city names are small that means that one you do head to can limit your options. Heading to Tokyo means there are five unique letters and you might not even need any of them, but winning might prevent another player from getting a rare letter like K. You might think Y’s would be hard to find, but with New York and Sydney around you’ll never be starved for those letters for long. A trip to San Francisco or Rio de Janeiro can obfuscate just what letter you’re trying to get, but since the group gets to influence the way the plane flies, only smaller games really seem to hit on that idea of trying to puzzle out why the other player chose the upcoming city if things swing their way.
The overall experience is hosted by an Amelia Earhart inspired navigator character known as Amy who will deliver a few jokes between rounds and explain game rules as needed. Some of her jokes are simple corny puns or jokes about the flight, but the pool seems fairly small and you’ll definitely be hearing repeats before you’ve even done five full games. Games can go by speedily if players get the perfect flight plan and keep winning the minigames, but longer rounds can last if letter acquisition is continuously blocked, making it even odder Amy’s commentary is so limited. Perhaps the oddest thing about it though was the first time I ever played she entered a city and made a deja vu joke that seemed to assume I had played the game many times before, so there doesn’t even seem to be anything in place to distribute her small set of lines in an even manner across the experience.
Amy doesn’t really hurt things since her impact is not very substantial in the first place and boils down to a few lines here and there, but the word games are the real meat of the experience and come in fifteen different variations. Some of these really do take simple familiar word games and turn them into a competition, such as having a word search where you only score points if you’re the first to find words within the letter jumble. There are two games that are just variations on Boggle, players making words by drawing a line through a square of letters but having the letters disappear after doing so in one of the variants. Other games include ideas like grabbing letters as they scroll by to build the biggest word you can and adding in vowels to a row of consonants to make a word, and these are entertaining little challenges if a bit lacking in the exciting interactive party angle. Quite a few of them are solid concepts but you just spend the round looking down quietly on your phone until the timer runs out or everyone has finished their work, and just seeing a simple score or singular word on screen isn’t really the energetic coda to a round you’d hope to find in a game focused on competing with in-person friends and family.
There are some games that do this a bit better though or simply have intriguing ideas that work because of that pressure to act before someone else does. One game has a word appear on screen and players pick whether they think its fake or real, leading to that moment after every answer where people will be able to laugh at unexpected outcomes. One challenge has players take a four letter word and swap out one letter from a batch they have on screen to make a new word, the game focused on speedily completing your alteration and dropping it on someone else before your timer runs out. The sudden appearance of a word means you can’t plan ahead too much and there’s tension in trying to find any good word to survive but also wanting to take others down by doing something tricky.
Some of the games are purely entertaining on their own with the extra spice coming from comparing answers after or racing to figure things out first. One game has players turn a combination lock to try and construct a mystery word from the available letters, another has players pulling letters out of a larger one to make increasingly smaller words until no more can be made, and one has a set of eight word parts players need to combine properly to make real ones. All of these work as concepts for individual play made a little more interesting by having everyone working on the same thing and thus you can feel a little more triumphant in finishing the challenge first or getting the best score. However, just like Amy’s commentary, the available pool for these word game’s subjects isn’t as expansive as you might hope and answers can start reappearing after only a few rounds, but it might also be a similar situation where the game doesn’t do any major alteration to how its random selections take place.
Ultimately, the 15 word games themselves even start to feel a little recycled as you play a few sessions of Wordhunters. The overlap in concepts and a lot of reliance on placing letters in order can make things feel samey even between different minigames, but at least none of them feel like outright boring or flawed in concept. It could be nice to be able to simply play these games as single-player challenges, but throwing them together in the rounds of a multiplayer competition where novelty feels far more important makes it a little harder for a whole group of people to be invested in repeated trips around the world.
THE VERDICT: The 15 word games featured in Wordhunters are an accessible and often entertaining bunch even if they might not be supported by the best format for them. Some games don’t thrive in the competitive setting and others don’t stand out enough from the crowd to keep the overall globe-trotting adventure varied enough to keep player groups coming back for round after round. All of the them are solid in their base concepts though and can be enjoyed just as challenging word games, with even a few minigames made better because they fully embrace the fact you’re up against other players. Wordhunters’s host certainly needs a wider pool of commentary and some of the word games could use more options to avoid repeated solutions, but Wordhunters can still entertain often enough because most of its designs are at least inherently amusing despite being rather dry for a group to be playing together.
And so, I give Wordhunters for PlayStation 4…
An OKAY rating. If you took all 15 minigames in Wordhunters and let a single-player select them individually from a menu, it could be a decent time waster on the phone. Very few of the ideas outright hinge on players directly competing, instead mostly going for a higher score in the time limit or getting the right answer earlier. The concept for the multiplayer sessions slows things down a bit with the constant flying about to the next location, and the game speed and structure might also help things lose their novelty much more quickly. If you were able to play rapid fire rounds in a single minigame type it would feel like one part of a bigger challenge rather than going from area to area to play a short and quick word game. The stop and start is key to supporting the grander goal of building your secret word, but there’s not too much excitement to waiting for the next round to start since everyone will just be quietly looking at their phones for a while when it kicks off. The minigames are at least enjoyable on their own independent of any structure or competition but not exceptionally so, meaning that you won’t be bored playing them but it also doesn’t feel like much of a multiplayer experience beyond the city selection portion and the rare game where you truly impact each other’s options.
Wordhunters really can’t hold a candle to the humorous word games featured in games from the Jackbox Party Pack series, but it does take the already mild and accessible enjoyment of the kinds of word puzzles you find in a newspaper and add a decent extra layer to it. Its draw isn’t too strong because competitive word searches and anagram solving really do feel like working on the same thing at the same time rather than interfering with each other too much, but the 15 minigames do work as word puzzles still even if they could have been presented with a more fitting framework than the world traveling adventure with a charmingly corny host.