Word Puzzle is less about a variety of actual puzzles, and more about a series of word searches. You remember word searches right? Typically when I was in school these things were handed out in Elementary School as an easy form of extra credit. How someone figured this would make for a good game, much less an 800-point ($10?!) Xbox Live Arcade title is beyond me.

The game consists of three modes, Free Play, Challenge, and Arcade. Free Play is exactly what it says it is, just a series of boards that expand in size as you play to gain a high score. Arcade mode takes that same thought but puts a time limit on it, and then Challenge mode makes up the actual gut of the game. In challenge mode you'll go across 9 levels divided up into three stages each. The puzzles will start off small and basic, with your word list (yes, every puzzle has a list of words provided) highlighting certain words that will "explode" within in a given amount of time. If you manage to diffuse all the words you'll move on to the next stage. You have a life bar on the right side that goes down as the words explode, and once they're all gone, it's game over.

The game is as challenging as it sounds, which is to say, not at all. The only thing that Word Puzzle does to offer you a challenge is in the format of the board on screen, which will expand in size as you play and also change into a cube form, giving you four different sides to find words in. Also, in challenge mode only, things will pop up on screen to obscure you view. However, that's not the only thing that works against you. For whatever reason they decided to present the game within a small window on screen, with a lot of screen space wasted on lame archaeological art stuff. So when the game board expands and the window doesn't, your view of the board becomes partially blocked, requiring you to scroll along the board to see everything. This is particularly annoying because the scrolling doesn't keep up with you as you move along, and can it can take a few seconds for your view to actually catch up to where your cursor is.

Basically, Word Puzzle is an annoying, lazy, and boring game, and gets a definitely do not buy from me. I'm not sure that this would change even if the game weren't massively overpriced at $10. If you want to pick up some word searches for fun, just opt for one of this big $2 black and white volumes that always litter the racks in supermarket check out lines. You'll have more fun with those.