Author: Steve Haske

Cartoon Network’s mobile division—particularly that behind its edgier Adult Swim-branded fare—has historically been a pretty good fit for goofy, whimsical little arcade-style titles that focus on simple game design while still managing to be fun. Globlins doesn’t really fit that criteria, despite looking decent enough at a glance, with colorful storybook art and a cute, kid-friendly premise involving blotting out tiny microscopic organisms.

The puzzle design also seems solid on the surface. Scattered across a grid, each stage requires you to get rid of all the so-called globlins using a finite supply of water droplets. Smaller critters need a few drops before they’re big enough to pop, at which point they send goo flying in cardinal directions. Goo works just like a droplet, so poppable globlins can cause a chain reaction with other nearby microbes when hit. Of course, the higher the chain reaction, the more replacement droplets and in-app currency you earn.

While it can be fun to watch a grid full of globlins go off like a series of firecrackers, the way they’re often herded together undermines any incentive you might have to carefully strategize which to grow or pop. Generally, you have between 8-10 droplets at your disposal, and a big chain will net you a large replacement cache. So go ahead, choose a random clump of smaller globules before popping the catalyst—it’s almost always a completely risk-free action. When the last glob has popped, you’ll have plenty of droplets left to take out any stragglers, making the whole exercise feel neither challenging nor particularly rewarding.

On the other hand, the difficulty spikes immensely when facing bosses, which are damaged by wayward goo and consequently regenerate health by sucking up any remaining globs you fail to clear with one calculated pop. You’ll move through a handful of grids in each showdown, meaning bosses have multiple chances to regain their health if you make a bad move. Power-ups and specials are typically locked behind hefty currency prices, making them an ineffective strategy for those unwilling to shell out actual cash. With such abruptly exacting standards amidst otherwise middling tasks, you’ll probably want to step away from the microscope.

The bottom line. Despite the cute aesthetic, Globlins is not one of Cartoon Network’s finer efforts.

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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