I love word games. On TV I'm a sofa Countdown king, in the back of papers, anything to keep my mind ticking over during downtime or travel. Would I play this on the PS4? Unlikely, but on the Vita Mixups is a fun and friendly distraction.
The mechanics are universal and simple, each theme has six pages of clues and letters, where you need to make three words or phrases related to the theme. With 120 themes there's plenty to be exploring, with trophies scattered around some of the harder selections.
From what I gather the themes are petty much universal, i.e., the baseball theme isn't going to stump non-Yanks with "designated hitter" and English monarchs won't throw any of the totally obscure or short-lived ones for non anglophiles. Astrology shouldn't require divine inspiration while others will test both spelling and memory - other sections take a little liberty with the language, like the pirate talk, to provide an extra chuckle.
Instead, I can breeze past the first couple of pages, and then get stumped when I'm suddenly convinced "Womble" should be a part of the human anatomy, or trying to figure out a pointy object that isn't fork or a bird that's not a puffin, even though the letters are there. There's a non-gameplay element of having fun trying to guess what words will come up, and I was quite often surprised (no porcupine - seriously?)
A little lateral thinking can help, but generally I plodded away despite there being three or four suitable but incorrect answers on a page. It would be cool if you could note down your wrong answers somewhere, so when you come back to a page later, you don't make the same mistake twice, but that might cramp the otherwise clear and simple UI.
With a tinkly happy tune in the background and some basic sound effects, this won't task the Vita's battery much. Just as well, as the hours flew by while trying to make up palindromes or think of desperately tenuous colour names, camel is a shade, right?
When truly stuck a hint option is available, showing the first letter of a word, but that'd be cheating, right? If you like word games, this is great fun, if you want to improve your (or the family's) vocabulary, it also provide a useful tool. POWGI and Lightwood have a great little puzzle niche going here with the likes of
Pic-A-Pix Color among a growing roster, and in the twilight of the Vita's release schedule, all are welcome.
Score: 7/10
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Price: £6.49 (PSN)
Developer/publisher: POWGI/Lightwood
File size 270MB
Progress: Where's "Penguin" dammit!
