Highrise Heroes: Word Challenge

Genre: Unlimited Pattern Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in the Puzzle Bundle – 3 in 1 compilation, along with Quell Zen and Swapperoo.)

Highrise Heroes is a family-friendly Unlimited Pattern Puzzle game much in the same vein as the classic game Bookworm, that has players forming words out of letters that fall on the game screen. This game was originally released on mobile devices in 2014 before being brought to PC a few years later and finally making it to Nintendo Switch in 2020.

The presentation here is decent, albeit a bit odd – the game’s theme of characters working their way down a massive skyscraper after a disaster is already a strange one in a game whose gameplay is about spelling out words, but it becomes stranger still as you work your way through the gampaign and the story keeps adding odd elements (like monkeys, apparently). The visuals here are basic and work well enough, and the music works well without being memorable, but the overall experience here is still a strange one given the conflicting elements.

As for the gameplay, what’s here is good. Starting with the same basic gameplay as Bookworm gives this game a solid foundation to work with, and to the game’s credit, it adds extra elements throughout, such as characters with special abilities, portraits of those characters that need to be lowered to the bottom of the screen, and the need to chain “oxygen” blocks to those characters to keep them healthy. The fact that the character portraits can be made to be a part of a word’s chain makes this game somewhat easier than Bookworm, as it gives players a lot more options to choose from when stringing together letters, but that doesn’t bother me too much – an easier challenge level isn’t necessarily a terrible thing, and does in theory make this game more accessible.

Additionally, the port to Nintendo Switch is pretty good here, with solid controls both with a traditional game controller as well as in handheld mode using a touchscreen. Between the two, I think the touchscreen is the better way to go, but either control scheme works fine.

No, the big problem here isn’t the gameplay or controls, it’s the lacking game modes. Highrise Heroes features a campaign with 90 levels and a series of challenge mode levels, but it has absolutely nothing in the way of an endless mode, and zero multiplayer options. This was a huge disappointment for me, because otherwise this is a fantastic Puzzle game, and it’s a real shame to see a game get so much right only to fail to stick the landing like this.

If you’re looking for a decent, but finite, single-player Puzzle experience that will test your vocabulary, Highrise Heroes is a superb entry in the genre, and while it’s a bit derivative of Bookworm, it does some interesting things with the formula to set itself apart. It’s just a shame this game is lacking game modes and multiplayer, which would have made it something truly excellent.

tl;dr – Highrise Heroes is a Puzzle game in the same vein as Bookworm, albeit with some unique gameplay elements that set it apart and a bizarre story about escaping a skyscraper after a disaster. The core gameplay here is excellent, but the game is lacking in content and has no multiplayer, making for a good but disappointing experience overall.

Grade: B-

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