Buy Now...

In this game you will be called upon to help Lex defeat a series of monsters with your word creation skills.  These monsters are trying to stop Lex from rescuing his friend Cassandra the Oracle who has been kidnapped.  With your help, a rescue might be possible.

As the game’s title indicates, Lex has to work his way through more than one adventure; in fact there are three separate adventures although only the first one is initially available.  The second and third adventures only become available when the previous adventure is completed.  There are also mini games, involving creating words from letters within a time limit; guessing a word in five attempts or less; and spelling a word using all the provided tiles.  As with the later adventures, you do need to make progress in the game before the mini games become available.

In order to rescue his friend Cassandra, Lex will need to defeat a whole collection of monsters in a turn-based contest which takes place in the top half of the screen.  While Lex’s attacks consist of charging headlong to head-butt his opponent, the reciprocal counter-attacks are more varied in their approach and sometimes have the added effect of stunning Lex.  When this happens Lex misses a turn.  Both Lex and the current monster are issued with heart health icons which will diminish depending upon the severity of the attack.  When these health icons are used up, somebody dies. 

See also: Games

more

The lower half of the screen is given over to the letter grid and various special features available to each of the combatants.  The letter grid used in Bookworm Adventures consists of four rows and columns, thus giving you a selection of 16 letters.  Unlike Bookworm Deluxe where the selected letters needed to be adjacent, with this game you can select any combination of letters as long as they make an acceptable word.  When an acceptable word is created, a flashing “Attack” message will appear allowing Lex to charge forward.

As mentioned various special features appear on either side of the grid.  Those relating to Lex are on the left while the monster has the right side.  These features can take the form of potions to cover health, attack and defence issues.  So as not to encumber Lex too much, he is limited to just three features of potions which are selected from a list.

The adventures cover various locations housing a number of monsters.  Each monster, with the last one in the level being a super-charged Boss, must be defeated.  Various insulting comments fly between the two combatants to add extra spice to the contest.  Disappointingly these comments are displayed as text rather than being spoken.  Other conversations, used to move the game forward, also adopt the text approach.

As Lex makes progress through the different levels, locations and monsters, different types of tiles appear.  Some of the new tiles will be beneficial, such as adding to the power of an attack or building up Lex’s defence capability, if used in a word.  Others, though, can prove to be a handicap.  Some tiles can be used to create a word but do not count towards the severity of an attack while others are temporally unavailable so reducing the selection choice.

Although one or two of the monsters were visually unimpressive, most of them could easily have escaped from a nightmare and are based on mythical creatures.  As the game’s difficulty increases, so Lex has access to more health icons and a wider range of potions from which to make a selection.  Bookworm Adventures, while retaining the word creation aspect of Bookworm Deluxe, it is more enjoyable and has a greater addictive quality.

System requirements call for a 700MHz processor with 256MB RAM and 45MB of available hard disk space running Windows 2000 and later.  You can download and try out the game for 60 minutes before purchasing a licence costing £14.95.

http://www.popcap.com/games/bookwormadventures?mid=bookwormadventures_pc_en_full