What do bees do whilst in the hive, away from prying human eyes? You might think that they are bringing in pollen to feed the young, or maybe monitoring the temperature of the hive. Planet Idiot refutes these silly facts, suggesting that the industrious insects are instead playing games of Bumblicity, an addictive mix of both Scrabble and Tetris. Oh you clever bees!
Bumblicity is a great puzzle game that is easy to pick up and hard to put down. For 80 :MSPoints:, you’ll be able to play three different modes that will keep you firmly planted in front of the screen for a good while. One or two players can opt to butt heads in Versus 5:00 or Versus 10:00 modes, and Endless Play awaits solo players who want to later wonder how the day got whittled down so quickly.
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As the Tutorial will explain, the busy bees will buzz along in a line and drop letters or letter combinations (like “ea”) in turn, and it’s up to you to decide where on the grid to drop the letters to form words. Words are only accepted if they are formed with three or more tiles, so don’t expect to get away with “by” or “to” copouts. There’s a little flexibility in that words can be spelled forward either horizontally or vertically, and players have access to a backup tile that can be switched with the current tile by tapping the bumper; this swapped tile must be dropped before the swap is made available again.
From time to time you will encounter special tiles that can help or hinder your gameplay. Wildcards will do the hard work for you, cycling through all tiles randomly in order to make a word out of the heap of letters it’s been dropped into. If you find yourself with a cluster of letters that need clearing, the bomb tile is your remedy. This tile destroys all the tiles it touches, helping to knock down towers of unused letters before they reach the top of the grid, thus ending your game. In versus modes, black letter tiles will send “garbage” tiles to your opponent; these trash tiles can only be cleared with the aforementioned bomb tile.
Forming a word out of a few tiles is just one way to boost your score. Bumblicity isn’t satisfied with low scores; subsequently, there are many different ways to boost your point total. Once a word is formed, the tiles will light up, indicating a brief window of opportunity for you to form more words with these tiles before they disappear. Once the tiles are removed, if more words are found from the resulting shifting of the pieces, that combo will consequently multiply the word score. Blue tiles can be dropped in order to form words as normal, but the blue tile also serves as a score multiplier for the word that it forms.
Blue stars are also scattered over various grid squares, and forming a word over the star will award bonus points before the star is relocated to a new position on the board. If you form a word vertically and horizontally using the same connecting tile, this cross-word bonus will also lift your point total. Finally, three bonus words will be displayed in the middle of the screen. Forming one of these words will grant you the “jackpot” that climbs over time. After one of these words is used, the bonus point total and bonus words will be cleared and begin anew.
As you can see, Bumblicity provides a pleasant word game that appeals to Scrabble fans, Tetris fans, or both. The graphics and audio are unremarkable, but not unpleasant; honestly, this is the expected recipe for a puzzle game that inevitably becomes more frantic in pace as the match progresses. For 80 :MSPoints:, Bumblicity is a buzzworthy game that won’t so much as sting your MS Point honeypot.
You can find more information on Bumblicity as well as the trial and full versions of the game on the Marketplace.
