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- Price: $0.99 (Get Full Version or Free Demo)
- Version: 1.0
- Official Site: Ian Marsh
The best puzzle games will keep you thinking about them long after you’ve stopped playing. I found out too late that Textropolis is one of these games. I made the mistake of playing it at around 2 AM the other night, intending just to give it a quick try, and ended up spending a good hour on it. Afterward, all I could think about while lying awake in bed was how many words I missed in the last puzzle I played. Damn you, Textropolis.
The gameplay setup will be instantly familiar if you’ve played the Anagrams portion of Nintendo’s Crosswords DS, or the English class minigame in Rockstar’s Bully. The game presents you with an eight-letter-long city name, and from the letters that make up this word, you must piece together new words that are four or more letters in length.
That’s it, really. If you correctly guess ten percent of the total words possible, you can move on to the next city name. As you guess words, your overall population number will grow, and you’ll eventually divide your time between guessing words in new cities and returning to old ones to fill in words you missed the first time around.
The population meter isn’t just for show — you can sacrifice 1,000 people (not literally) at any time to get a hint for a word that you’re missing in the current city. The hint feature is more valuable than you’d think. Getting ten percent of the possible words in any given challenge sounds easy, but you’ll find yourself blanking more often than you’d expect, especially since some cities feature more than 300 word possibilities.
Gameplay-wise, Textropolis performs almost flawlessly. Letters are entered via a simple touch interface, and it has all the basic deleting and word recall functions you could ever want. The game even displays the definition of every word you enter, which is a fun touch, and is actually useful whenever you end up piecing together a fake-sounding word that turns out to be real.
The only thing I would add to Textropolis is a letter-scrambling function, ala Bully. Staring at the same formation of letters throughout an entire stage is tiring, especially when you’re down to guessing the level’s final few remaining words. Otherwise, Textropolis offers pitch-perfect execution of a great gameplay concept.
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