There are a number of skills that old people bring to the table, but throughout my years I have witnessed two which stand out in particular: the first being their incredible ability to carry on conversations about last week’s fishing trip for hours on end any time they call technical support about a simple computer problem, and the second being their unmatched prowess at the game of “Crossword”. On this basis, the reason why developer Interserv International has decided to bring this legendary form of elderly entertainment to the youth-laden land of the Xbox 360 (and for 800 points, no less) eludes me, but the release of Word Puzzle certainly raised enough of an eyebrow to warrant a closer look.

To address the challenge of converting the somewhat plain style of Crossword to Word Puzzle, the developers have wrapped the game in a 3D graphics engine and added some varied gameplay modes to spice things up. There are five distinct modes of play – three singleplayer, and two multiplayer. “Freeplay” is a simple expanding challenge to locate sets of words across increasingly more complex playing fields, while “Arcade” is a race against the clock to try and trigger combos and highlight the requisite words. “Survival” is the final singleplayer mode involving working your way through a specific set up levels, trying to match up words in a given order before they “go off” and explode. Meanwhile, the two multiplayer modes are basically split up between a “Local Battle” setting for playing on the same console, or an online battle mode through Xbox Live.

Part of the problem with Word Puzzlehowever is that the game doesn’t have the same addictive staying power that other puzzle games on XBLA do. Sure, I like the frantic feeling one gets trying to desperately locate those obscure, hard-to-spell words when the clock is down to almost nothing in Survival mode, and Arcade mode is something one could keep going for hours with enough effort. The downside is that after a relatively short amount of play time, it’s easy to feel like you’ve seen everything the game has to offer. The multiple gameplay modes have different playing fields (such as spherical or pyramid-shaped designs, as well as a nifty “3D cube” setup that you need to rotate in real-time to find all of the words), and you can switch between a single-input or dual-input mode to specify if you want to use one or both analogue sticks to line up and match words for more gameplay alterations, but even these don’t really add much excitement to the standard gameplay formula. The game could really benefit from some more exotic modes, like having a real-time competition versus AI to match words up (though balancing such a thing may be tricky), or adding many more different level “themes” and color sets to keep the waves of new content coming and encourage players to keep playing.

This unfortunately is backed up by a somewhat plain looking graphical style; there are some glitzy particle and lighting effects used for certain events (especially in Survival mode), but in a game completely dependent on the repetitive act of finding and matching up words over and over again, having some extra graphical glitz to celebrate a good performance is imperative, and this unfortunately is where Word Puzzlecomes up a bit lacking. There simply isn’t the same level of “oomph” I would expect from the effects that trigger when you match up several words in rapid succession or complete a level, making the entire process not quite as satisfying as you’d find in other puzzle games.

At the very least, the local multiplayer gameplay is a hoot, although this is pretty much limited to a straightforward competition to grab more words than your friend does, without any of the real gameplay twists singleplayer has to offer. The online multiplayer looks a bit more interesting with promises of “prop cards” (bonuses which can distract and disorient your opponents while trying to out-word them), but unfortunately I had very limited success actually locating online opponents to play with at this point. Online play is also camera-enabled, for those who want to add that extra ‘intimate’ twist to their gameplay experience (though knowing the Xbox Live community, I’d be more inclined to just keep this turned off).

If the game was a bit cheaper and clocked in at something like 400 points instead, it might be a bit easier to recommend – but for 800 points Word Puzzle will definitely need some more content released to stay afloat.