Catchy Words is a simple educational Augmented Reality word game for ARKit-powered devices. In this game, the player needs to catch floating letters and arrange them in the frame so they make out a word in English, they are scrambled by default. Of course, every set of letters can construct a word, but you need to solve which word is it.
I’ve played this type of games before but not in AR. The nice thing about the AR version is that it combined movement and it feels really nice being able to collect a letter using your device. All you need to do is to first get to the bubble where all the letters are stored and pop it by touching it. Now the letters will start floating in the room, usually somewhere above your head.
Now, to catch a letter, you do the same, you aim your device and walk towards that letter and touch it. Once you touch it, the letter will stick to the front of your device and you can drag it to its appropriate location in the floating frames.
The thing is that you might not know what words is it, but you can still put the letters even in the wrong place and figure out the word later and change the letters positioning so it will construct the right word.
The physical interaction of getting a letter out of the frame and putting it back in another place feels really nice and you need to try it yourself to understand what I mean.
Everything regarding the AR performance works really smoothly and mostly without any issues. The only issue I had was when I left the app to another app and came back in, it shows the confetti from the from the other round I’ve finished, although I’ve started a new round. It also happened that sometimes that letters will just fly far away and I just couldn’t reach them because I would have bumped into the wall. I recommend just spawning the game a bit far from a wall and you should be fine.
Catchy Words is definitely aimed for kids. It can help them memorize some words and do it in a very fun way. I think that the confetti in the end after you successfully solve the word is a nice positive reinforcement for kids.
Here, check out some Catch Words gameplay to see what this ARKit game is all about.
Most of the words that I’ve got where very short, but after playing like 15 minutes, I actually got quite a long word (“Confusion”). I didn’t try to play longer to see what’s the longest words I can get.
Everything nice so far, but I can’t ignore the fact that the game lacks lots of content and it could have been much better. There are so many things that the developer could have added to make it more fun and challenging. For example, add the option to choose the word’s length, create a difficulty mode so this game can tackle even adults, maybe adding a competitive mode where you can play the game against a friend or choose words from different categories. These are just a few examples, I can actually write a long list of things that I would have added to the game to add more replay value to it and make it more fun to play. The thing is that I don’t think that those things take too much work, so I do hope the developer will add more content to the game in future updates.
The developer did a good job porting the popular word-solving game and bringing it to Augmented Reality (AR) in an original and entertaining way, gameplay wise. This game has a much higher potential with more game modes. It just seems like a concept than a complete game, or should I say, mini-game.
Having said that, it’s a free game, so you can just download it and try it out. I do hope that the developer will get to read this review and improve this ARKit game. I’ll definitely keep an eye on future updates and hope for the best.