There's no words there! [...] Fuck it! We'll do it live!

The concept of Letter Quest is pretty appealing: Using lexical prowess to strike down fantasy monsters and buy character and equipment upgrades. Even without any meaningful story, this arrangement of mechanics seems like a clear win. But there are a couple fundamental implementation problems that suck the fun out of this game before very long.

The first is that the letter selection - what semi-randomly-chosen letters are available for making words out of - simply isn't good enough. There are only 15 letters to work with, so the statistical likelihood of being able to spell a long word is pretty low overall. And although it's obvious that the game has gone to some effort to prevent e.g. the letters F, U, C, and K from appearing at the same time; it doesn't afford any similar algorithmic smoothing to ensuring that Q always appears with a corresponding U, or that an X can be used in anything other than "axe." I could observe the letter selection giving me more doubles of letters when a level-specific challenge required it, but it wasn't smart enough to realize that there just aren't any words with a double-H. And I found myself noticing "... I have no vowels" on more than a few occasions.

If you can't spell anything with the current selection of letters, your only recourse is to recycle the whole board, which gives the enemy a free hit. And this just becomes more likely in some special enemy- or level-specific scenarios, which make particular letters or letter combinations useless. In short, what the game really should be all about - spelling - is made artificially difficult by the random constraints of the letter pool.

Letter problems aside, Letter Quest's levels are also poorly balanced. The challenge level starts out pretty low, but enemy health and attack power scale up much more quickly than you're able to effectively counter. Upgrades seem unreasonably expensive for the amount of crystal currency you accumulate in normal play; almost as if the game wants you to buy some booster packs or something. In lieu of that option, you'll need to grind out more crystals by replaying the same stages over again. (Not that there is much diversity between stages, anyway.)

Letter Quest starts out fun, but becomes tiresome and irritating after several levels. And the tedious soundtrack doesn't help either.

Progress: Got to level 18, 39/120 stars.