I've always sucked at crossword puzzles, but when it comes to search-a-words I always seem to do pretty well. I'm no idiot savant like John Nash in A Beautiful Mind where words pop into view off the page, but if I take my time I can usually finish one fairly quickly. If pen and paper just isn't your thing, be prepared for digital word searches on the Xbox 360 by way of the Xbox Live Arcade game Word Puzzle. Here's an early review score hint: buy a book of word searches and a pen instead.

The ultimate reason Word Puzzle fails is because the fundamentals are so different than the source material it borrows from. A part of the challenge of a word search comes from taking a list of words and searching endlessly over a page looking for where it may be hidden; the hiding is a natural part of the game and the discovery of a word that has taken you a while is where the inherent fun of word searches come from. Though one mode gives you this sense of accomplishment to a degree, the Arcade mode is completely flawed in that it points the combo letter out (begins or ends a word) and even goes so far as telling you which word you are looking at. Imagine doing a word search, someone comes over and looks over your shoulder, and then points to where the word is and all you have to do is circle it in…that is the gist for much of Word Puzzle.

The Arcade mode is all about making combos, which come from highlighting words that use the highlighted letter on a board. The more successful you are at chaining combos together (finding word after highlighted letter word) the more points you get towards your score. The problem is that as long as you find the highlighted letter quick enough, you should have no problem making long combos (mine was about a level 38 combo before I slipped up). There are only two factors affecting whether you'll get the combo: a timer that quickly counts down and the fact that levels change things up a bit to affect difficulty, such as giving you a larger than usual board or making you rotate a cube to find the highlighted letters.

Survival mode still has you making combos, but with two minor twists. For starters, you can get extra points by matching up words that are similar or opposite or have a relationship to each other. Sweet and salty could go together for being grouped together as tastes, while something like happy and sad could go together for being opposites; some levels will also have a hidden theme, and if you can find that theme word (like tennis) then you'll get extra points. The second twist comes from word bombs on your list, which, if they explode, will cause a momentarily hurdle to appear on your screen, affecting the ease at which you were finding words. You'll have dancing tribal shadows blocking half the screen, dark clouds circling over and making letters hard to find, and even a solar eclipse can happen and make you search with what looks like a flashlight. The bomb effects are meant to be challenging, and they are to a degree, but they come off more annoying than a natural progression of the gameplay.

The biggest problem with Word Puzzle is overall the lack of challenge, as the game is just too easy, and I'm not even an expert in word searches. By giving you a letter in the word and telling you what the word is, there simply isn't any fun in just seeing which direction the word goes. A more challenging and fun way to experience the game would've been to give you the highlighted word to make the combo but not a starting or endling level; that way you'd know what word to look for, but wouldn't have that nagging finger pointing to the beginning or ending letter, making the searching part of the game basically pointless. The other problem in the difficulty comes from the fact that once you have found almost all the words, the other ones practically pop off the screen, because there are no words that share a letter and cross over each other, so oftentimes whole words are framed by words you've already discovered, making the hidden words anything but.

The graphics aren't very advanced and are often pretty plain looking. The environments don't really change all that much, other than changing a slight motif and the color a bit, but changing something from orange to blue is not a graphical celebration worth us "oohing." The game looks decent enough, but with a game so graphically un-demanding, why is there so much slowdown when it comes to words clearing themselves and having to spin the cubes around. The game handles the audio a little better, featuring soothing sounds and a nice melody that plays over the searching.

Word Puzzle could've been an average game at best, but a few gameplay decisions and the overall lack of technical polish leaves this an Xbox Live Arcade that will leave players feeling ripped off if they plunk down their points for it. For as much as Word Puzzle costs, you'd save more money and get more fun from buying a book of word searches and a fresh pen.

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