Editor's Note: Welcome to the first Casual Friday! This new weekly column highlights a different casual game every Friday, to help you pass those last few hours at work before the weekend rolls around.
PopCap releases another fiendishly addictive puzzle game with monsters, worms, and copious verbage. Read all about it in our first Casual Friday.
Download Bookworm Adventures
Bookworm Adventures is the sequel to PopCap's Bookworm, and is a game of wordplay and high adventure. It finds the wormy protagonist, Lex, sucked into the books of his library where he must battle against mythological foes of all kinds, from mummies to genies to the gods themselves in order to save his professor and the oracle Cassandra. A demo of the game is available for free on PopCap's website, while the Deluxe version is available for $29.95.
The story thus far...
I was initially skeptical about a casual game selling for around $30, but Bookworm Adventures definitely did not disappoint. The game itself is somewhat like a cross between Scrabble and Final Fantasy. Lex is faced with one monster at a time, and he must spell words from the available letter tiles in order to defeat them. The longer the word (or the more unusual the letters), the more damage Lex does. As the game progresses, Lex acquires more artifacts that give him bonuses for different ways of playing. Some artifacts – such as a pirate parrot or a deity-infused hammer - increase the damage done by certain letters or kinds of words. Others increase Lex's defense or his resistance to certain types of attacks. Adding to the power-ups is the presence of gems in letter tiles, which boost the tiles' effects and add other types of damage such as fire and frost.
Lex in action.
Like all PopCap games, Bookworm Adventures is deceiving. It may look cute and harmless, but that façade hides a deviously deep and addictive game. The combination of items and gems keeps the game fresh, and the changing nature of enemies means that a good amount of strategy – as well as wordiness – is needed to succeed. To keep you coming back, there are different unlockable play modes, such as timed mini-games and an arena mode in which Lex battles each of the game's bosses in rapid succession. All of this makes for a good 10-15 hours of play in the game's single player adventure mode (slightly more if you're a stickler for using precisely the right word), and untold hours of time-wasting in the unlockable mini-games.
Addictive mini-games abound.
The lengthy gameplay means that some things that would be otherwise-ignorable in a shorter game become a little irksome. The music becomes repetitive after a little while (so much so that I ended up listening to my own music collection while playing), and the monsters begin to look the same and make use of the same models. Similarly, some of the items aren't very useful, and seem to have been thrown in simply to take up space – though this is somewhat offset by the usefulness of other items (tip: don't leave home without your Aegis of Athena). But these are mainly nitpicks that don't detract too much from the overall enjoyment of the game.
Unfortunately, some words aren't recognized by the game.
In summation, Bookworm Adventures is a cromulent diversion affluent with amusement and adversity which, notwithstanding its foibles, is nevertheless quite an incandescently commendable soiree. In short, it's good times all around. And you might just learn something, too!
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