Bookworm Adventures Deluxe

Our protagonist in this adventure is Lex, the bookworm! This game is based off of Bookworm Deluxe, a puzzle game where you need to use adjacent letters to spell words that consist of three letters or more. This particular affair is a puzzle game that was given some RPG elements.

The story starts off with some chick being kidnapped and it's your job to hop into the books and rescue her. Along the way you fight monsters of varying degrees of difficulty. Your armaments consist of a 4x4 block that has letter tiles in it. Spell a word with any of the tiles that is three letters or more and you deal damage based on the words you spell. The enemies you fight have different moves that deals you damage. Some attacks damage you, some attacks cripple your ability to spell words, and some attacks just freeze you in place for a turn. There's also an attack that lowers the amount of damage that you do. They even sometimes come packed with immunities to certain types of attacks (which becomes more prevalent as you progress through the story).

There are elements that add a bit of a strategy to this game. For starters you are given three different potions to choose from. You have a potion that heals, a potion that has the ability to increase the amount of damage that you do, and a potion that removes all negative effects from Lex. There's weapons and accessories that you find along the way. You are only allowed to carry three to any given chapter in a book. Lastly, there's gem tiles that have differing status effects and damage modifiers.

The dialogue is cheesey and it's meant to be so. Keeping that in the back of your head while you play makes the dialogue enjoyable. It's amusing to see phrases along the lines of "I know he was cheating!" when you die. What's clear with the dialogue is the general age group this is intended for. There are plenty of words used in the dialogue that say, someone under the age of 12 or 13 may not understand.

Other elements of the game, like sound and graphics are nothing to write home about. They're there. The sounds are annoying from time to time as you constantly hear the same sounds again, but turning your speakers down is always an option, one that I exercised on more than one occasion. It's nice to see that the graphics aren't a jaw-dropping adventure. A game like this shouldn't have graphical requirements that only a really good PC can handle.

The gameplay itself is generally really fun. I enjoyed spelling words like "bondage" or "labia" a few times throughout the adventure. When you can have "dirty" words equate into damage, it somehow feels right. Dirty words aside I generally like the individual challenge it brings. This game does challenge you to sort out the letters in your head and then forces you to form the biggest words possible to deal the most damage. The addition of strategy to the game makes it more fun. Now I get to pick what I take with me into each chapter and hope that I don't need to use every potion that I have along the way, only to be bested by the boss. The gem tiles? They're useful too! I find that the power down gem is the most effective later in the game, as just about everything has immunity to poison.

A nice addition to the game are the three different unlocks you get as you complete each book. The first unlock allows you to view every monster you ever fought up until that point and see what their strengths and weaknesses are. Completing the second book allows you to play each of the mini-games you run across in your adventure. The final book opens up an arena mode where you go through fighting each boss again, starting from the first and going to the last. There is a check point after every five battles, allowing you to change your loadout.

What I don't like is how useless some of the items seem. I honestly did not use over half the items I was given. I don't care about the item that causes "R" tiles to do double damage. The golden fleece is only useful for about a fifth of the game. The final item you get is useless. I never once had it work with any of the bosses I fought in arena mode.

It's also greatly annoying how some of the baddies can endlessly heal themselves, causing the very devastating seven letter word you just whalloped him with to be negated, followed by having half of your tiles smashed right after that, ensuring that if you do manage to spell another seven letter word, half of the tiles won't do damage.

In terms of replay value, this game doesn't really offer much. I'll play it from time to time, but since I've beaten the game, I really have no incentive to play it again, unless I want to try and do it faster, which sounds pretty boring to me. The real question boils down to this, is the game worth the price? While it's on sale on STEAM for $15, I say yes it's barely worth the price. At the original price of $30, it's a rip-off. There's nothing about this game that screams "deluxe".