Scramble With Friends – Review

Our rating:

By: Zynga

Version #: 1.1.4.12

Date Released: 2012-01-12

Developer: Zynga

Price: 0.99

User Rating:

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Do you have perfect spelling? So you think you know every single word there is in the dictionary? Whatever it is, Scramble With Friends is the game for you.

Taking Scrabble to a whole new level, Scramble With Friends pits you against either players from your friends list on Facebook, contacts stored on your iDevice, or even randomly selected players from all over the world. The game does a good job in matching you up with random players, but the downside is that you have to wait for the other player to finish his game before you both can move on to the next round.

The objective of the game is rather simple. Think of a crossword puzzle meeting the Swype keyboard interface of the Android phones. Players are pit against each other in three nerve wrecking rounds where they have to identify as many words as they possibly can by swiping adjacent letters. Each round lasts for two minutes. This is no walk in the park, for commonly used words rarely appear. Instead, words that you would probably never thought existed are scattered all over. Players can seek solace in the fact that different power ups are available to aid you in game. These include the ability to freeze time, hint for words or scramble the set of letters made available to you. However, these power ups come at a cost.

While this game is definitely addictive, my only complaint would be the token system. Each game you play consumes one token. As for power ups, the first one per round is free, but an additional second power up costs a token per use. As you start playing multiple games while waiting for the previous ones to be ready for the next round, you will find yourself going through tokens very quickly. To get more tokens, one simply has to wait. Depending on the version of the game you play, this will take different amounts of time. This is indeed a very irritating way to limit gameplay.

Scramble With Friends comes in two versions. The free version allows you full access to the game with the only restriction being that tokens recharge slowly and you have to put up with advertisements after each game. The paid version allows you to recharge your tokens at twice the speed, as well as not having any advertisements to irritate you. At 99 cents, it is definitely worth sacrificing a cup of coffee for the upgrade over the free version. This is an extremely addictive game and can be played whenever you have two minutes to spare.