by Word Puttz definitely gets points for its original premise: take a casual game of Scrabble, throw it on a miniature golf course, add an octopus, and you’ve got this new free-to-play affair. Okay, so the octopus doesn’t actually have much impact on gameplay other than being your guide to this oddly linguistic puzzle hybrid, but it’s worth mentioning for the sheer oddity — and in that vein follows the essence of Word Puttz itself.
Adapting the basics of a crossword puzzle for a putt-putt course may not sound like the easiest transition, though to the developers’ credit, it’s actually fairly simple. Instead of a golf ball, you spell out words to move your way across the green, with limitations imposed via prerequisites like grabbing four coins or attempting to reach the goal in 30 letters or less. The latter is your stand-in for par — all you have to do is spell out a word that passes over the cup.
There are other, weirder permutations. You’ll race your cephalopod teacher to the end of a round by spelling out words as fast you can, for instance, and Super Mario Bros.-esque warp pipes (which deposit a letter to a different part of the green) make a surprising appearance. Word Puttz is free-to-play, though like the developer’s mobile You Don’t Know Jack port, the teeth of its microtransactions aren’t terribly sharp. Go over par and you can buy new sets of letters, or run out of lives by failing too many holes and you can replenish them — though you’ll get a new one for free in 15 minutes.
The bigger problem here, at least for avid crossword fans, is that a lot of the requirements to finish any given hole have a greater focus on Word Puttz’ golf-tinged mechanics than they do with, say, pulling off 14-letter-word combos. There’s also something amiss with the letter randomizer, as the game appears prone to doling out bad letter draws — which of course you can buy your way out of after a handful of free trade-ins. The novelty of Word Puttz can sadly overshadow its wordplay at times.
The bottom line. Word Puttz is a solid free-to-play puzzler, though it won’t scratch the itch of advanced word nerds.
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