Today’s game is a mixture of match-3 and crossword puzzle. The game is called Buzzword by Desktop Gaming. I only played the trial which is 60 minutes, but I felt it was good enough to get a feel for the game. The goal of the game is to reach the next level by filling the “honey” meter. 
The game proceeds by clicking on adjacent letters that’s arranged in a hexagonal grid. You get points based on the number of dots underneath a letter, the length of your words, and you get a bonus for finding the buzzword. Little arrows show up to show the order of the letters in the word. Left-click selects a letter, to deselect a letter in the word you’re currently making, you have to left-click the letter above it, indicated by the arrows. You can deselect a whole word by right-clicking. There’s also something called “marking” where you hold down the right mouse button and then once in marker mode, you left click the letters you want to mark. I’m guessing this has something to do with a word you want to create, so you mark the letters and continue playing. I don’t really see how this could help you though, because once you finish a word, letters fill up the remaining spots. In any case, when you finish a word bees leave the playfield and fly into the beehive on the right of the playfield, which fills up the honey meter. Play progresses as the honey meter is filled up. 
Every so often a letter turns a different color, which means that a word using that letter could have double or triple the regular value. A way into the game, certain letters get locked. You can only unlock them by creating more words. This is a lot like many casual games out there, not really that addicting, but not too boring either. I found I filled the full 60 minutes of the trial, and kind of wanted to continue. I didn’t really have that strong of a need to continue either though. Word games are meant to challenge the mind, and not usually the reflexes, although I wished this game did challenge the reflexes a bit more.
There are a couple of drawbacks to this game as I see it. One, is that it takes too long before the “locking” letters come into play. I think I was at level 7 before that started happening. The other is the fact that you click the letter above to deselect the letter below (in the order you’ve chosen), but once you’re down to one letter, you can’t click on anything, and you have to right click. I think the letters should be able to be just selected and deselected. Then you could deselect part of a word by deselecting letters in the middle of the word. Other than those issues I think the game is fairly solid. Those that like word games will love this, those that like action games might find it a little boring. Personally I’m in the middle. I enjoy word games, but I prefer if they’re a little bit more active than this game is. 
The graphics are adequate, but nothing special. The title screen shows a honey bee, and some dripping honey effect on the screen. Then it continues to the main menu, where it does the same honey effect, only behind the menu buttons. Music and sound was fine, and to be honest, I really wasn’t paying attention to them while playing the game. I was too focused on trying to make matches with the bonus letters, and buzzword. All-in-all, a decent game but not outstanding.
Name: Buzzword
Developer: Desktop Gaming
Price: $2.95
Final Analysis: A decent game, but not the greatest, however with the price I would say good value for the money.
Where you can get it: Buzzword’s BMT Micro (a payment processor) page – please note the Desktop Gaming page has Buzzword for $6.99 as well as Reflexive.com which is a developer and game portal. the $2.95 price through BMT Micro was in the developer’s signature on the blitzbasic website. I have a feeling the lower priced version goes directly to the developer, so I would recommend that (I would anyways since it’s less than half the price as the other listings). If anyone reading has any objections to this note, let me know in the comment section to this post.
Tags: Buzzword, Casual, Desktop Gaming, game, games, independent, Indie, Match-3, review, reviews, windows
Nice review! :)
A little note on the pricing, as far as I’m aware, Dave (Desktop Gaming) gets slightly more royalties through the $6.99 checkout at his site than the BMT Micro one… So if your feeling flush, nab that instead eh! ;)
Dabz