Bookworm Adventures Deluxe PC Game Review

Have you played Scrabble before? Have you played an RPG (Role Playing Game) before? Bookworm Adventures Deluxe is a Scrabble with some RPG elements on it.

You are playing as Lex, a green worm with nerdy glasses, fighting hundreds of different monsters using not your two handed sword or a rifle, but WORDS!

Bookworm Adventures Deluxe is an addicting game and guaranteed to improve your English vocabulary :)

Bookworm Adventures Deluxe is pretty. You won’t see a 3D graphics with anti aliasing options, texture mapping and such, but the graphic still looks great on your computer. The interface is intuitive, however you need your mouse to click on the letters to form words (You can’t use your keyboards, unfortunately)

You start with a few health (defined with the heart symbol on the top left of the screen) and as you level up (by defeating monsters), you’ll get more health.

Enemies have health too (which is displayed on the top right of the screen) and by reducing their health to zero, you’ll win the round. It’s turn based, so you attack first, and then the enemy, and so on.

You reduce enemies’ health by forming words from letters that are given to you at the start of each battle (random). The longer you form the words, the more powerful your attack is. So if you can form a 6-letter word, it will be far more damaging than a 3-letter word, for example.

There are a few chapters in the story and each chapter consists of several map locations. On each location, you’ll usually encounter several monsters that you need to defeat, and at the end of the battle, you’ll meet with the monster boss of the location. Each boss battle is tougher than the miniions (as expected, of course), meaning you have to form a more than 4 letter words consistently to win. Well, you don’t have to, but bosses usually have a lot of health and a lot of abilities.

Wait, abilities? What do you mean? Abilities are skills (or attack types) that each monster has. The simplest ability is “an attack that damages Lex”. There are others such as freezing Lex for a turn, or locking some of the letters so that you can’t use them for a few rounds, and there are others too.

To make the game more interesting, you can carry 3 equipments (or treasures) of your choice into the battle. You get more equipments by beating a monster boss. Each equipment has unique ability that can improve your attack power, make you more resistant to damage, and so on.

For example, you can have an item that can boost your damage when you are using X, Y, or Z letters on your words. There are many more items to collect, so I won’t spoil it here.

Bookworm Adventures Deluxe has a decent storyline, so you are not fighting meaningless battles. It also has some jokes being thrown during the game (the speeches, the description of each enemy, etc), so make sure that you don’t miss them for pure fun.

It also has some mini games to keep you on your toes. Completing the mini games is optional, but if you can win it, you’ll get potions or more powerful letter tiles.

You can drink potions to give you instant health or other effects.

Conclusion

Bookworm Adventures Deluxe is a good game and addictive too. You can’t compare this game with Crysis, the Witcher, Call of Duty and such, but it still is an attractive game for all ages. If you are lucky, you can still grab the 50% discount which will expire on 3rd of January 2008 on the PopCap website.