Wordland

wordland: let's travel is pretty much the same as wordland, wordland 2 and wordland 3, except it adds a theme, which it should've done after the first game.
it's still a great word game/crossword/tetris hybrid. there are various shapes with letters on a grid and they have to be arranged to form all the words described on the bottom. this is where the educational element comes in, descriptions assume a bunch of geographical knowledge (or googling skills) from the player. no diagonals, only left to right or downward, but they don't all have to be connected to each other. in fact, the game accepts layouts that wouldn't fly in a real crossword (e.g. va-tic-anc is accepted even though the answer is vatican).
50 levels instead of the usual 100, unlocked one by one. the 3 difficulty levels control the amount of revealed letters (more on easy, only the first letter on normal, none on hard), but there's no indication of any of this in the game, so you can't see which levels were completed on which difficulty.
controls are very convenient, left click to pick a piece up, mouse wheel to rotate in either direction, another left click to place. my biggest gripe with the original game was the size of the board, lots of tedium when the word was one letter too long and the entire thing had to be moved a tile to the left piece by piece. plenty of space on the screen, not sure why only a small area is used if it's not a lazy mobile port, but the current size is mostly good enough. towards the end there are way more pieces to move around though, so the grid could still be bigger.
excellent music, but using the same short loop in 4 games now and calling it 'original' is fucking ridiculous. backgrounds are also nice, some are animated and most are new this time (finally!), but they don't fill the entire screen properly, looks like some lazy mobile crap instead of the 'artistic choice' they went for. and some are still too dark to be of any use. they change after every restart or new level, and can be changed manually, and also locked so they stay the same all the way. a gallery of them could be a great reward for completing the game.
settings-wise all the neccessities are present, separate volume settings, windowed mode with a couple resolution options (there could be a few more), and level selection is also a thing. these are all accessible from the main menu and while playing.
it's high time an entry in the series got a more specific coat of paint, the first 3 games are 99% identical, more of exactly the same, music and backgrounds included. besides the traveling aspect there's suitcase decoration here as an optional extra. not much to it, unlock stickers by solving levels and place them on your luggage that you can also color or draw on, but it's only shown on that screen.
instead of vocabulary, the game is based on geographical information, but difficulty depends on the individual player's knowledge all the same. still, it's really pleasant overall, just like the ones before, but hopefully if there's more coming, they'll all have a theme and more unique features. I'm always down for food-related stuff, for example.

Easy puzzle game with a nice concept and shaky execution. Could have been so much more but ended up being simply middle-of-the-road.
Thumbs up only for an interesting idea of combining geographical trivia and “sort-of Tetris” (or maybe Tetris-like jigsaw puzzle) in one game. This was a nifty construct, and with proper care it could have been a lovely experience, as it stands – it all kind of stopped just short of that “lovely” line.
What worked:
- The initial idea of combining trivia and a puzzle game is brilliant. It’s an all-in-one relaxing gameplay where you get to ponder on the questions, and then ponder on how to put them together correctly – I really enjoyed that. Apparently, this is a geographical spin-off on the previous three installments (which I haven’t tried), but I like the idea of subject-specific trivia, so I can see lots of directions this game can expand in.
- Gorgeous background images. They invite and entice and tempt to go on the new adventure, aka elicit an emotional response – which is what art is supposed to do. And these are no 8x8 paintings, just static 2D backgrounds in a small game, and yet… Let’s just say I came back from a kayaking trip recently and looking at their image of adventurers in the boats – I immediately planned the next one.
What was “whatever”:
- There’s a good soundtrack present, but it becomes repetitive REALLY quick. It screams, begs and cajoles for some variety.
- There’s a luggage customization option. Sort of like an additional mini-game/experience you can partake in, which I didn’t care for. If you’re into this kind of thing – there’s your chance to be creative – paint your luggage and put stickers on it, but I didn’t use it all. I’d much rather developers spent whatever this cost towards an additional good track to accompany me on this journey.
What didn’t work:
- There are a few “kinks” here and there like repeated questions, some answers that bend a rule a bit as far as word placement (as of you can solve the level without connecting them or you can connect them in way that adds an additional letter to word that was already done, making it a word that doesn’t exist), grammar problems. All of these are related to a core gameplay mechanic which makes them stand out a lot more than if they were just a few side issues.
- Some questions give away the answer in the way they were asked. When you get a question – you are given a first letter of response and the number of letters in a word. Most of the questions are direct – you need to provide an answer, but some are asked in a way – is it THIS or THIS? When you see something like ‘Is it Japan or Indonesia that…” and your answer shows J_ _ _ _ What was the point of this question??
- The overall difficulty. For some reason, the default level here is “easy” not “normal”, beware, but if you decide to try your hand at a “hard” setting – you’ll get the same set of questions you just had but with some extra letters mixed-in (not in all cases either – some are the exact same tasks as on “easy” level, with no added letters). This will work as an “increased difficulty” only if you going to start a game with this setting from the get-go, if you going to go for it after playing the game on lower settings, like I did – you’d already have all the responses memorized (there aren’t that many and some of them are pretty unique), so you’ll be flying through levels anyway. I think this is simply not a hard game, regardless of the difficulty level, and it’s a shame, really, because geography trivia has potential of making thousands of levels without a single repeated question.
If “WORDLAND Let’s Travel” would have kept the original concept and art, added more music, went with a fine-toothed comb over all the tangles in their gameplay, and added new/more questions to different difficulty settings (which would have made the game enormously more replayable) – it would have been an excellent puzzle game. As it is – there’s great potential bundled with a wobbly implementation. This is a very tentative “finger pointing upwards”, as it isn’t a bad or broken game, but it’s pretty underbaked.
Well, at the very least – I’ve got my next kayaking trip planned out of this one, so maybe, if not for smooth puzzle experience, you too can get some inspiration out of it.

This game is so cool! I'm not a native English speaker and it's fun and it's also an amazing exercise. I've played other titles in the series and they're all great. I recommend!

This game has interesting geography questions and great letter puzzles. The art and music combine very well. I can only recommend!

Traveling is all good, playing with words is fun and customizing your luggage is "traveling" in creativity.

excellent game and very didactic, I played it for almost 2 hours today and I can't wait to play more tomorrow :P

I had a nice time playing this game. The concept is interesting and all fit great together!