When it comes to word games, it seems that most of the time the game is only ever as good as your actual vocabulary dictionary. Most games require an understanding of many different four or five letter words to advance you through the game, while knowing only a few basic words of three letters will lead to nothing but frustration. Jabber bridges the two extremes fairly well, letting word masters make some dastardly long words while yet giving those non-English college majors a chance at winning for a change.

Once upon a time Mr. Rabbit was bored and wanted to read a story, so he went to his library, climbed up upon a ladder, and reached for his favorite story – The Snow Queen. As it turns out Mr. Rabbit is quite the klutz, and so the story takes a tumble and the words from the book shake loose and go flying. If you're wondering how the letters on a page managed to be thrown off, welcome to the club. It's up to you to help Mr. Rabbit find the words to his story, in the end making it so that both you and he can read the story of The Snow Queen together.

Though the game makes you think you are actually finding the words in his story, you're in reality doing anything but that, as the game will accept any proper word that you can think of and that is also in the game's internal dictionary. The game board is setup like many other games in the word game genre, with tiles of various letters scrolling towards the bottom of the page. Besides letters you'll also find asterisks that you can use at any time in conjunction with other letters to make a word. For instance, if you wanted to make the word "RUN" but didn't have the "U" needed to make the word, you could click on the R, move to an asterisk, and then select the letter N to finish the word. Having so many asterisks at your disposal really help ease the frustration and difficulty that can quickly come by playing the standard word game, but yet the game is also pretty remarkably easy at the same time.

As you complete longer words, you'll start placing magical flowers on the screen, which when used to create a word will lead to more points than usual. Some of the flowers are permanent and will stay on a stage until you beat it, but some flowers wilt and die much quicker, letting petals drop-off in a clockwise rotation (in other words the time left before the flower completely disappears from play). The game also gives you the chance to up your score by making the mystery words the game generates at random. Another way to pad your score is through the minigames, which have you trying to remember the pattern of letters on the screen and saying where a certain level should be, or either making you remember placement and clicking on the letter that has changed.

Instead of having a timer system to make you think and move quicker, the only challenge comes from the ice blocks that will slowly make their way to the bottom of the stage, ultimately freezing Mr. Rabbit and ending your game. The only way to eliminate the ice blocks is to incorporate them into a word, which like we said is easier than usual thanks to all the asterisks. We managed to die once throughout our time with the game, but only because we didn't know that letting those blocks drop would end our game.

Besides the story mode there is also your standard arcade mode, which plays just like the story mode except for the fact that it's continuous and doesn't feature different levels. A nice thing about the game is that as you complete the levels (aka fixing the chapters of Mr. Rabbit's book) you actually get to read the story of The Snow Queen. The story isn't amazing by any stretch of the imagination, but it's decent enough for children to enjoy.

Graphically, like most word games, there isn't a whole lot you can do to make players "ooh" and "aah" at the visuals. When you're looking at a screen mostly filled with simple letters, it's hard to make that standout in any possible way. Besides the letters there is a nice looking background complete with ladybug crawling around and an animated Mr. Rabbit who changes his facial expressions based on what you are doing. On the audio side of things, both the background music and the sound of words being created sound average, but nothing too special at all.

Jabber isn't a terrible game if you're a fan of word games, but it won't push you to your vocabulary limits either. Players who don't like word games because of the challenge might find a game more to their liking with Jabber, but yet it even might be too easy for them to enjoy it all that much.

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