Word Collect (app)
Word Collect is a good word unscrambling app which brags on the splash screen that it has "over 2000+ levels". Which is comically redundant. But yeah, over the past year we have reached over 1000 levels on various devices. Somehow it sees my phone and tablet as two different users, so I can be on the same league and compete with my other self.
A lot of other word unscrambling apps have been showing up as ads on other apps, but all of those Word Cookie and Word Forest and Word Whatever apps felt more juvenile than this one. I don't need smiling ducks or photos of the pyramids to find the words any faster. Few things are bigger turn-offs for me than a game that tells you everything to click on and never stops nagging. This app assumes you came here to do these word puzzles and just lets you do them.
The one big UI issue is that while connecting the circles containing letters you may sometimes hit the edges of other circles and screw up the word, sometimes costing points.
When it comes to word-based apps, the quality of the dictionary is important, and no dictionary is perfect. When you choose a word there are only three possible outcomes: 1) the game ignores it completely as being invalid, 2) it recognizes that it's a word but it's not on the limited list shown on the screen so it goes into the "extra words" bin, or 3) it's one of the selected words and helps to complete the current puzzle. What's frustrating is that it's inconsistent about (1) and (2). Some words like ERG will sometime be recognized and sometimes ignored. Missing a word breaks the escalation of points for consecutive word matches, so it's more than just a personal tic.
Sometimes, it accepts bizarre words it can't even find a definition for. Other times, the definition is just wrong, like saying RENO is a word because it's a city in Nevada. That would make it a proper noun and not playable. Maybe it thinks it's short for "renovation", but it is weak on abbreviations. It does not recognize REPO (remember "Repo Man"? and at my job I access file repositories every day) or REFI or many others that are commonly used. For sounds, grunts and groans, it takes a lot of them, but not ICK or ACK. It takes FIE, TUT, YIP, YAP, YAWP and others, but are they really any more official as words?
There are a fair range of challenges, from the team play to timed "lightning rounds" to pets you can feed to get extra tokens or discounts on boosters. Completing daily challenges gives points that give you cute but non-functional animal tiles with super short factoids.
Since starting with the app, my speed at these puzzles has gone up enormously. And it's a relaxing thing my girlfriend and I can both do late at night. It's interesting how one person can get stuck staring at the same letters for too long, and another person can see new words right away while being stuck on their own puzzle. Or how we might both get stuck in our own puzzles and just swap tablets to break out of it.
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