Alphabear

Alphabear has cute little square bears, it's got a cool word puzzle, what's not to love? Well, *cracks knuckles*, I'll tell you what's not to love.

But lets start with an explanation of what this game is about. Alphabear is a word puzzle game where you are given a grid with a few visible squares on it, with a letter on each. You use those letters to form a word, and each letter you use unlocks a square next to it. You do this until you run out of letters on the board. When you're finished you're awarded with a random cute little bear. These bears give you bonuses to your score, but they don't really add anything to the game.

The problem with this game is that, well, that's about all of it. It's one puzzle over and over again. It gets harder, through the placement of rocks in the grid, and you're given fewer turns to use letters, and the target score gets higher, but for the most part you're doing the same thing over and over until you get bored.

The other problem with this game is the difficulty. When you get to a certain level, the target score is so high that you can't reach it, even with my mammoth intellect. This is clearly a problem with the game since I am infallible. But seriously, I was doing the best I could with the letters I was given and not getting close to the target. Now, those bears I mentioned at the start can help here, and you can improve those bears. For example, the Pirate Bear adds 57% to your final score. Earn a second pirate bear and the pirate bear now adds 60% to your score. So the idea is kinda commendable. It means

that if you lack the skill to win outright, you can keep playing and improve your chances just by winning more bears. The reason this doesn't work is that the volume of bears required to make a difference is way out of whack. So you have to spend hours grinding just to pass one target score, just to play the next level which will be basically exactly the same. (Edit: I've just found out this is a remnant of their previous Pay-to-Win model. The difficulty ramps up to make you buy extra bears. Bad form to do this in the first place, and bad form not to fix it for the steam edition)

So, as much as I love word games and wish there were more of them on Steam, I don't think I can recommend this one. There's just not enough variance, and that difficulty level spike kills it. Still, those bears are cute. 2/5 stars from me.