uWordsmith (Wii U) Review

Upon launching the game, one is greeted with a generic menu and meditation music, and none of the three game modes are explained to any degree. Checking the digital manual is an utter waste of time, as it provides absolutely no information about the game and the only thing in the manual of any practical use is the contact information for CHUDCHUD's support team.

With little to go on, "Arcade" is likely to be everyone's first choice. The television displays stock images pulled from Wikimedia, which depict whatever the scrambled word is. The GamePad's screen has two sections, and in the top section is a row of scrambled letters. This is all there is to go on, and nothing happens by unscrambling the letters, discarding the letters that don't belong, and pressing buttons. Time runs out, and the player loses.

As it happens, uWordsmith is played by dragging the necessary letters from the top section of the touchpad to the bottom section. After thirty minutes of seeing "Time's Up! Score: 0000," it still had not been figured this out. Upon emailing the support team, they quickly replied with a link to a YouTube video showing how to play the game. Playing it is very unintuitive, and this problem shouldn't have existed in the first place because some amount of instruction could easily be given in the game or the manual.

While the Arcade mode pulls from all 12 categories and is simply about getting a high score, the Challenge mode is more structured and awards stars for completion. Each category can be attempted at Easy, Medium, and Hard difficulties, and one star is awarded for each successfully completed. These stars unlock other categories (only four of the 12 are unlocked at the beginning), as well as Mosaic Mode.

Unfortunately, each category is really only good once, but each category has to be done three times if all the stars are desired; it can't just be completed on Hard to get the Easy and Medium stars. The amount of time given to decipher the word decreases as the difficulty increases, and the amount of unnecessary letters increases. Since the Easy setting is completed and the words are familiar, Medium offers no difficulty at all. Hard, on the other hand, continues to be difficult, though its difficulty is derived from having just barely enough time to put together a six-letter word and remove any unnecessary letters. This is compounded by touch controls that don't really accommodate the fast and frantic movements required for Hard difficulty.

After earning five stars, Mosaic Mode is unlocked. It is like Arcade, except the displayed images are pixelated and blurred beyond recognition. As the timer counts down, the images become less pixelated and less blurry. Mosaic Mode is a lot of fun and is definitely the best uWordsmith has to offer.

However, that's pretty much the extent of what there is to do in uWordsmith. There are only 12 categories, each of which only has 14 to 15 words, though CHUDCHUD relayed that they plan to implement an additional 300 puzzles this summer. That would be great and would nearly double the game's content, but what's really missing is something more fundamental: a "story mode" type of game with boardgame-style or card-game style progress. All in all, uWordsmith feels like it lacks a game mode.

There is multiplayer, as well, but it involves competing for the high score. There is no difference between playing Arcade once with two players or twice with one player, so it's tough to say whether this genuinely counts as "multiplayer." It is present, though, and could provide a few minutes of entertainment among friends.