Spellspire is for you if you like words and always wanted to be a wizard

Spellspire, from developer 10tons , is a fast paced mashup of an action role playing game and a word puzzle game. The hero is a wizard who looks a little like Harry Potter and a little like the novice from Hocus Pocus . The objective of the game is to work your way up a tower with 100 levels. The tower is full of fiends, or enemies ranging from knights wielding dead fish, ninja goblins, oriental skeleton sailors to hippy unicorn zombies. Each level presents you with a tileset of 10 alphabets, which must be used to quickly form words. Every time a new valid word is keyed in, the wizard casts a spell. The potency of the spell depends on the length of the word formed. The longer the word, the more powerful the spell.

If you really want to concentrate on the game, you must not allow yourself to be distracted by the cool animations and mayhem going on in the top half of the screen, and focus only on the bottom half of the screen with the letter tiles. You can keep keying in words as and when you can think of them, though there are slight pauses in gameplay when the hero has just crossed a mob and is walking over to the next set of enemies. Some tougher enemies and bosses have timers, you need to come up with multiple words before the timer runs out, and kill them. If you are unable to form a word before the timer runs out, then you get attacked by the mobs and lose health. Consumable potions are available in the in game store to restore health.

The in app store offers many other consumables, which can be purchased from coin drops. These are required to boost your damage or tanking ability when coming across tough enemies. The learning curve is smooth, but there are difficulty spikes that force you to replay levels to get more coins to get better gear. This does introduce an element of grind, but the word game aspect prevents this from being a real problem.

Spellspire is also an ARPG, with hats, robes and wands available for purchase. These gear apply special modifiers, such as a wand that makes three letter words more potent. Each item can be upgraded with coins. The individual choices affect the player as you progress through the game. The right combination of gear, or at least sufficiently potent gear is needed for at least the boss battles, unless you really are a wizard with wielding words.

Spellspire is a free to play title, and the only downside is the countdown timer for getting more lives. It costs a prohibitive one dollar to instantly buy a life, and the store is not one of the more balanced free to play titles. Still, if you can look past the time sink mechanic, or only plan to play for a few minutes at a time, this is a great title that blends RPG and word games. Spellspire is available on the App Store.