New Software To Be Reviewed Review

I enjoy word games and the other Big Kahuna games, so I had high hopes for Big Kahuna Words. Before I get too deep into the review itself, I should tell you that I played this on my Mac using the Parallels emulator and Windows XP. Big Kahuna Words loaded very smoothly and play was at the right speed. I didn’t have any problems at all with this game, which has not been the case with other games, especially games put out by Alawar.

Once I got everything up and running, the first thing out of the gate that made me cringe was the tutorial. I do not like tutorials, especially for games that are easy to figure out. Unfortunately for me, not only was the computer voice an annoying surfer dude, but you I couldn’t skip the tutorial, at least as far as I could find. I admit the tutorial was not very long, but still there should be a way to skip it.

The object of the game is to form words from a panel of letters by connecting them to neighboring letters. Once you use all of the letters with the stone background, the level is complete. Pretty straightforward. (I definitely didn’t need the tutorial to figure this out!)

There are a couple of twists to the game to spice things up. One of these is the locked letters. Locked letters have a silver border so you can tell they are locked. To clear the block you must use the locked letter as the first letter in a word. Really they are not too hard to unlock. Another twist is that the game lets you switch a letter with its neighbor. I kind of felt like this was cheating. If you don’t like any of the letters, you can clear all of them by pushing the volcano button.

After every level is complete you are taken back to your aquarium scene to add more fish. This is exactly the same as in the other Big Kahuna games. The whole process from end of a level until the start of a new level was a bit too slow for my liking. I just want to play the game, I don’t really care so much about being brought back to the fish tank every time. I’ll go if I want to, but don’t make me.

As far as the music goes, it’s your standard computer game music, which I generally don’t like. One positive thing about Big Kahuna Words is that you can listen to the music or set your audio option to listen to the ocean instead. The ocean sound is very relaxing. You are able to mute the game sounds, the music/ocean sounds individually or together, which is definitely a feature I liked.