FastWord Review

Requiring little commitment from its players, FastWord is easily dipped into when the mood strikes you. It's a word game, much like Scrabble or Boggle, but with an extra strategical edge to it, ensuring it's quit interesting. It's sure to be all the more enticing once you draw some friends in.

Each player fights it out to create words from a grid of letters. They can pick out letter tiles in any order they want without having to worry about keeping them next to each other, or anything like that. The key here is to use them all where possible, otherwise you lose points for any leftovers.

Once you've finished that round, you move onto the chase side of the game. This involves trying to create words again, but with a catch. Your opponent is doing the same thing so you have to try to use letters before they've already used them up. It's all done asynchronously so you don't have to worry about being online at the same time, but FastWord works pretty well in still giving you a busy experience. It makes you feel more involved in the process rather than simply taking turns. Once you realize how FastWord works, it also gives you an extra way of dealing with the first round: do you choose to take your time to create long words, or do you decide to make plenty of short words to stop your opponent from using many tiles? It's a nice extra layer of strategy for something that could otherwise be quite formulaic.

Each session doesn't take long to complete, so FastWord lends itself to dipping in to play throughout the day. There's a limit on how many active games you can have in the free build, but you can opt to pay $0.99 to get rid of that as well as benefit from a larger starting grid. More statistics also open up through this method.

It's all pretty fun, feeling varied enough while not overwhelmingly so. FastWord should prove to be a title that sticks around on your iOS device for a while, especially if you get some friends hooked in. Its only real misstep is that there's no way to communicate with other players, meaning you feel a little removed from them.