Wednesday App Review: Word Cookies

As a writer, I love words. They’re fascinating and interesting and I’ve spent a good portion of my life making money by using them. So, obviously, I have a pretty good vocabulary. Despite this, I’ve actually never been very good at word scrambles. I think my brain just tries to find all of the words at once. Despite this, I decided to give Word Cookies a try. The app itself is really just a repackaged wordfinder app much like every other one you’ve ever played. Players are presented with three to seven letters and you have to find as many words as you can by swiping through them. There is no time limit or penalty for wrong guesses, which I personally found pretty nice. There is a scoring system, but for the life of me I can’t figure out exactly how many points they grant at the end of each level, and really it doesn’t seem super relevant as you have to beat each level before moving to the next. While I’d love to tell you that this app was the most amazing word game I’ve ever played, and you need to go rush out and play it right now the truth is that it’s pretty par for the course. If you don’t have a large vocabulary you might be stumped by a few of the words, but what’s most likely to happen is that you’ll end up having to look up one of the dozens of cheat pages to find it; or just swipe randomly until something works. Heck, there were a few words (like “ret” which apparently means “to soak flax or hemp in water to soften it” which show up in the game) which are so uncommon I’m not sure why they were included as required rather than bonus. While the game is free to play, there are full-screen pop-up video ads which you can’t close until they are a few seconds in. This gets extremely repetitive after a bit of playing, and while you can pay $1.99 to remove the ads I personally didn’t think the game was enough fun to warrant the extra charge. As a side note, this game also committed the cardinal sin of making me watch an ad before I could close the game (or if you swap to another app and then jump back), which is one of my biggest pet peeves. I just about uninstalled it after that. Overall, this is a pretty enjoyable game which is almost ruined by intrusive ads if you play for more than a few minutes. However, as far as word games go, it’s not too bad (although slightly repetitive) and you might even learn some new words, provided you’re willing to go look them up later. There are in-app purchases for coins to use for hints, but personally I didn’t find them super necessary; there is no penalty for guessing after all. Word Cookies is available for Android and iPhones for free. At the time of writing, there is an optional Valentine’s skin which was kind of cute, and since there is also a winter one, it’s probably safe to say that it there will be various others, although they are optional.]]>