Friday Free Game: QWERTY Warriors Friday, November 17, 2006

I love word games, and I have played a slew of them. But I have yet to recommend a word game to my readers. This is mainly because most word games are simple variations on old themes, reworking of old games, and rarely offer something new.

This week's Friday Free Game offers something few other word games offer: real action. Sure, it's nothing more than the same type-as-fast-as-you-can game that we've seen umpteen times, but the presentation is what makes it stand out.

The game is called QWERTY Warriors, and there's not much to know about the game except that you'd better type fast. You're a warrior with a gun in the center of the screen and your enemies appear from the edges of the screen and slowly approach. Each enemy has a word beneath it that you have to type to destroy it; soliders have simple, three-letter words like "hen" and "lid", but more powerful enemies (like tanks) have longer words. There are also two special items that appear randomly: "fullhealth," which restores you back to 100 hit points, and "detonate," which destroys all of the enemies on the screen. Judicious use of these items is key to surviving the higher difficulty levels. I hunt-and-peck about 80 words a minute and found the highest difficulty setting was a real challenge. One bit of advice I can offer, however, is that if you use the "detonate" while a full health is on the screen, you actually get the benefits of both. So when you're in this position and being swarmed, don't try to type "fullhealth". Use the "detonate". It's shorter anyway.

As far as I can tell, there's only one major problem with the game: there are a number of words in its database that are misspelled, so be careful that you're typing exactly what's shown. QWERTY Warriors is fun for a quick distraction and it provides good tension for a simple word game. Give it a try.