Captain Glyph is the first release from Mars’ Toad; a pacey arcade challenge good for a quick, casual gaming session. It’s a solid effort too; though not without its problems that mostly stem from the control scheme. Simply put, one finger does everything—from maneuvering blocks Tetris style into position, to activating power ups with a tap, to selecting blocks in sequence to form a word. This isn’t really to the game’s detriment, merely that the selection isn’t as robust as it should be. Diagonal selection is a huge mandate to get working consistently, and even straightforward horizontal/vertical selections can get lost. We’re not exactly sure why.

Mostly, we found that by not attempting diagonal selections we’d get the game to play ball long enough for us to take a closer look. The power ups aid a lot in keeping the tile count low; you have a time freeze, bomb and tile swap at your disposal and like the rest of the blocks they appear randomly from the top of the screen. You do get to see the next block that will appear and so it is more like that popular block stacking classic than a word game. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the pace and objective of the gameplay which is to score as many points as possible under a certain time limit. You can do this quite easily by just spelling three letter words.

In addition there are a number of environmental effects that will stop you making matches; spike traps, cannibalistic plants and lava plumes amongst others that will appear on the screen briefly, disrupting the board and forcing you to either wait or make words from a more limited set of blocks. They don’t add too much to the gameplay as their appearance is easy to predict; what is more interesting is that each area has its own set of obstacles, terrain, music and even sound effects. The same due care and attention has been paid to each, keeping the game fresh as you journey on to discover all of the six worlds. We liked the music in particular and found ourselves humming the tunes as we played.

In all, there’s a little more work to be done here. If the selection control was improved upon that would make the game much better instantly; however it’s still lacking in features compared to Lexic (now Abca), which boasts four modes plus online leader boards. The fact that this game doesn’t even offer local high scores makes the purchase questionable. Despite that, we still enjoyed our time with this game even though it doesn’t dethrone Abca as our go to word game.

Media gallery

• 
• 
• 

Why not try...

---

• 

  Lexic

• 

  Wordulous

• 

  Textropolis

• 

  WordSearch Rush