 |
| | Gameplay
Sound
 | | Graphics
Value
|
| |
| | Publisher: GameHouse  Genre: Board & Card | | | Min OS X: 10.4 |
| |
|
Scrabble Journey has two basic modes, Quest and Quick Play. In Quest, you play through the maps and follow the storyline. In Quick Play, you can replay maps you have already played during the Quest.Because Scrabble Journey is designed to be a quest game, it has a something of a storyline. You also have an assistant, named Hodges. Hodges gives you a little bit of information about where you are going and makes suggestions about the expected difficulty of the paths you might take. You can also rely on him during gameplay to make suggestions about which letters to play. I found his suggestions to be pretty useless, and I found the overall storyline to be lame at best. The artwork for Hodges and other characters you run into at various points in the game was competent, but I didn't particularly like it. Maybe I would have found it more appealing if I were still a child. It just looks so much like the drawings one would see in a typical publication aimed at elementary school kids. The artwork for the Scrabble Journey maps, on the other hand, was much prettier. The color scheme and the drawings made perfect sense to me, and I enjoyed playing on them. Nevertheless, the animation on the maps caused some significant lag problems. Even though I tested the game on my iMac core duo (early 2006) with maxed out RAM and video RAM, I felt as though I was dragging tiles upstream to get them from my rack onto the map. I even tried checking the option to reduce the animation complexity to decrease the train on my CPU. However, it did not make a difference in the gameplay. Scrabble Journey provides both game sounds and a musical soundtrack to entertain you while you play. The game sounds were adequate and appropriate, however, the soundtrack was terrible. It consisted of a repetitive track that only lasted for a few seconds. I had to turn it off soon after I began playing the game. I've listened to some very repetitive music in my time and enjoyed it greatly, but the Scrabble Journey soundtrack did not trip my trigger. Overall, Scrabble Journey is a reasonably entertaining game to play. Its shortcomings do not completely outweigh the basic fun of playing Scrabble through an obstacle course. Pros • Challenging variation on a timeless word game
• Nice map graphics
• Adequate sound effectsCons • Gameplay can lag at times
• Terrible music
|
|
