String 'Em In

iPhone games that do best tend to be those that fill a niche that somebody has missed. If there's one thing the iPhone is not in need of, it's yet another word-based puzzle game. Yet, here comes one in the form of String ‘Em In. The hook? It hopes that you loved playing it before on digital TV and you want to have it with you wherever you go.

On starting the game you instantly realise one of its shortcomings: You're basically given a bunch of different modes that amount to varying time limits on doing the exact same thing. What's that, you may ask? Well, you're presented with a grid of randomly generated letters with which to form words. You do this by tapping the first letter of the word and subsequent letters must be adjacent to the previous one, while question marks are used as wild cards. When you make a word, its letters disappear and those above fall to fill the space, with new ones appearing at the top.

Despite it's digital TV roots, it feels like a game designed to be played with a mouse poorly converted for the iPhone. The trouble is, because the game uses a 9 by 18 grid of letters, the letters are too small on the iPhone screen.

So the developers had a choice between using fewer letters and using an ill-advised zoom mode, which makes the letters a moving target. Guess which one the developers went with? That's right: zooming. Zoomed out, your finger spans three letters, so you're probably selecting a letter, hitting several in the process thus forcing you to correct yourself before choosing the next letter and so on. All the while you are against the clock, it's very frustrating.

OpenFeint is used to provide a social networking aspect to String ‘Em In, but as good as OpenFeint is (the only worthy competition for ngmoco's Plus+), it can't make up for the games shortcomings.

The objective of the game is fine on paper, it's just how you are asked to do it that's the problem. Well, that and there's not much to it. While it can be fun, the problem is that there are cheaper (i.e. free) word puzzles available on iPhone that will easily scratch the same itch for you.

In any other market a passable word puzzle game for only £1.19 would be deserving of a high score. However, in the strange world of iPhone...