There’s more than a handful of word games out there on the Store—combining letters together makes perfect sense on a device with a touch screen—but what makes Textropolis work is that it is truly casual. In the same way you can pick up a book and read a chapter, you can find a few words and then go do something else. You're not pestered by time limits, which is a good job considering that you'll need quite a large vocabulary to complete any of the game's 30 words.

The words in Textropolis are cities in its world - to fully complete the game you must find 100% of all the possible four letter or more combinations (excluding proper nouns but including plurals) to earn the game's 300 stars. To complete a level with one star and unlock the next one you need only find 10% of the words contained within - and that 10% usually covers the easy words if you don't know many. Fortunately the game has a hint system. You may shake your iPhone or tap the hint button, but you'll lose population by doing so.

The longer the word you make, the more the population will grow - and it's a global counter that is the same for all the cities in the game. And, a nice touch is that whenever you acquire enough words, new buildings will appear in your city, along with people who will congregate around the text entry pad. So too is the dictionary system that tells you what a word means once you've found it.

The text entry pad itself is fantastic, with a 'last' button that will help you to add plurals much easier. Once beginning a word, the hint button disappears and is replaced by a delete button - which when held down erases the whole word (a quick tap will erase the last letter). It feels very intuitive - although we would have preferred the hint button to be nowhere near the input field - we kept hitting it by accident, which slowed down the gameplay somewhat.

The presentation in Textropolis is very charming, casual and brightly coloured. Nothing really felt out of place, and you can tell that a lot of care went into designing the graphics. We also appreciated the 5 slot save system, which is great when you don't want others impinging on your progress. There's no music, only a few small sound effects, but you can play your own.

In conclusion, Textropolis is not a major revolution. This kind of gameplay has been tried and tested on many different platforms, and even though the iPhone lends itself well to the game, we can't recommend it on the strength of the genre alone. However, with it's attention to detail, challenging gameplay and intuitive controls, it stands out as the kind of game that's ideal just to pick up and play. It's cheap too, and we can still recommend it even after the sale - so why not give it a spin today?

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