I don’t know why developers just follow the same trend instead of setting one by themselves because it’s really been a long time that I have reviewed a game which isn’t a RPG, match-three or endless runner. Yeah, readers too can check their devices to notice this fact because market is filled up with these three categories. The game which we have brought today doesn’t belong to any of previously mentioned categories and should be perfect for those who likes intellectual games. This game has created a hype on social networks and if you’re a social network-addict then there are rare chances that you won’t be aware of it. Alphabear is the name of this new addictive game, which could have been highly addictive if it wasn’t for the ‘wait-to-play’ part. It is made by the Spry Fox, which is the developer of award winning game Triple Town, and is available for Android and iOS devices.
Despite being launched in the starting of this July, Alphabear has achieved the mark of more than five hundred thousand downloads on Google Play Store and there is still more than a week left for it’s first month to end. With 4.4/5 stars rating across all platforms, interesting artwork and attractive gameplay will it be the next free time killer? So let’s take this game apart just to see if it’s the new game changer.
Alphabear is a word puzzler in which you will have to use your vocabulary to make words from randomly scattered letters across the frame. Whenever a letter is used, a bear will pop-up in its place. If you use a letter adjacent to a bear, the bear will grow up and take the place of that letter too. Making words gives you points which are required clear a stage. Maybe Spry Fox has a soft corner for bears because this isn’t the first time they’ve used cute bears in their games as the lead characters. The gameplay isn’t simple and easy as it appears because Alphabear features few twists.
The game starts with a tutorial providing guidelines on making and submitting words. You’ll tap a letter to select it and tap it again to deselect it. Whenever a letter is selected, it goes into the bottom of the screen and the total points that you will receive after submitting a word appears right next to it. If the word that you’re making is legit the color of grey mark, which is on the left-bottom, will turn green and pressing it will submit the word. As previously mentioned that bears appears on the place of consumed letters, bears require space to grow and can stretch in any direction i.e. if a bear is taking 4 columns, if you use all letters above it then it will extend and/or merge with other bears of that place. Try to grow them in every possible direction as big bears means more points.
Increasing the size isn’t easy as it appears because unused letters can turn into rocks which cannot be moved or removed. When game starts, every letter has a number counter on its right-bottom corner which indicates the number of turn remaining before that letter will turn into a rock. The color of unused tiles also changes from green, which means safe, to red, indicating it will turn into a rock. Rocks stops you for making bigger bears but you can always create more bears and expand them. The round ends when more words cannot be made. The turns remaining counter isn’t only related to usability of that letter but also with score that you’ll get by using the letter. The number which appears on the counter is multiplied by the base score which means if the base score is seven a red letter will give you seven score and a greenwhich has ten as counter value will give you seventy score.
This is the place where this game resembles many other trading card games.
Alphabear has chapters, each chapter contains several events with a boss event waiting for you at the end. Clearing a boss event unlocks new chapter and new bears too. Each event will have one or two eggs and respective target scores to get them. In case of two, the minor will represent a blue egg and the bigger target will represent a golden egg. Blue eggs contains coins which is the only currency of this game and the golden eggs contains a bear. There are almost sixty seven bears in this game and are distributed in classes which are Legendary, Rare and Common. That’s not all, again like card games, every bear can be evolved too and has hundred levels, and their level rises whenever you get the same bear from eggs. Now you must be wondering what purpose do they serve? The answer is that they act as a powerup and gives additional score boost for your event. Every bear has its own unique special abilities which increases after upgrading, few will give you final score bonus while others might increase the score of specific letters, there are also those bears which can make a specific letter appear more frequently etc. Bears also requires nap between consecutive events which can vary from few minutes for common bears to several hours for the legendary ones. If you cannot wait for your cute teddy to wake up then you can use some coins to do it which again increases for higher class bears. Depending upon round you can select multiple bears and their effectiveness will add up.
The events aren’t always the same. They come in different grid sizes and shapes, many of them will have limited time, few will also have rocks. There are also treasure events which requires coins instead of honey and gives special bears as reward. The worst thing about this game is that you cannot play it continuously because of two issues. First and major of the two is that all the rounds will not be available all the time because they are dependent upon days i.e. Thursday Basic etc. Sometimes you’ll even have to wait a complete day before you can play it again.
The second issue is that this game features honey, bears likes honey, and if you don’t have honey you cannot play. Honey is basically the energy system and it get consumed up pretty quickly as on average n event takes fifty to hundred honey, and regenerates at the rate of one honey per two minutes which means you’ll have to wait at least hundred minutes to play another event. For those people who want to go through levels quickly and honey is the only thing stopping them, then they can earn fifty honey by watching a video or use in-app purchase to pay $4.99 for infinite honey or they can exchange their coins with honey as they can get one hundred-twenty honey for one hundred coins.
Alphabear was on version 1.02 during this review and was still in beta phase as per the developer but I didn’t face any issue or glitches. Android Users needs to be on at least Android 4.0 (Ice-cream Sandwich) and for iOS devices iOS 7.1 is minimum required to run Alphabear. Alphabear isn’t a graphics intensive game which means there are tons of devices on which this game should run without any issue or log. This game cannot be played without an internet connection, which might be a major let down for many people.
Alphabear can be synced with Google Play Games for cloud backup of game data which means that it can be accessed from multiple devices and you don’t have to worry about your progression if anyhow you have reinstall the game. Signing up is easy, when you’ll open Alphabear for the first time, you’ll be prompted to log into you Google Play Games account and just follow up the steps then you’ll be good to go. There aren’t any leaderboards but there are ten achievements available of Alphabear on Google Play Games, I know these aren’t much and each of them give five hundred experience points which makes total five thousand achievable points. These achievement range from adding a legendary bear into your collection till making a ten letter word which can present difficulty.
There are different in-app purchasing options available for Alphabear one of them is previously mentioned and remaining three options are for coins. The basic coins’ package costs $4.99 and gives just six hundred coins in return, the second one is the most popular and costs $9.99 and fills your game bank up by fourteen hundred coins, and the last one is the most expensive and offers the best value for your money by giving you seven thousand six hundred coins for equally huge $49.99. If you aren’t willing to spend you hard earned money then you can always waste your bandwidth by watching videos and get forty coins in return.
One of the hottest word puzzle games out there is Alphabear, but coins and honey are really important to help you get through this game. You can get the coins and honey through the app store, but this ends up costing you real money, and this really adds up quickly. If you would like to get coins and honey for free, then you need to download our free Alphabear hack tool, which is right here on our website.
If you look at the image below, you will see how easy the Alphabear hack tool is to use. You just enter the coins you want on the options menu, and then click to get infinite honey.
First, download our Alphabear hack tool, which takes around 20 seconds, and then wait 20 seconds while it automatically installs. After that, select either iOS or Android, then click to get infinite honey, and input the amount of coins you want on the options menu too.
When you are ready, you can click on “Start” to run the hack tool for Alphabear, which takes less than 30 seconds to complete. After that, you can open up the app on your device as normal, and the items will be sitting in your account ready to use.
Use as many red and orange tiles as possible because red tiles will turn into rock and orange into red, but as they give you less score try to mix them up with other colors too.
Try to make the largest possible bears because a large bear gives you more points as compared to many smaller ones of the same area.
Try to avoid rock forming, if it’s inevitable then try to push them towards the edges or where they might not affect your big bear.
Wisely select your bears before entering into a round, for example, if round is time based then you can select Stretch Bear because it give additional time or you can select Dog bear if you like to make words with D, O, and G because it will give additional score for these letters.
If you’re not able to complete a particular round/event then you can play previous rounds to level up your bears as evolving them will increases their abilities which means more score.
Sometime two letters words, which might not be in your knowledge, can be accepted by the game hence you can try out random two letters words.
Alphabear can be funny, charming, challenging and all of these at once. The gameplay and the artwork are the two outstanding departments. The artwork is colorful and literally a joy to watch. It does feel that developer spent loads of his time on designing bears because they aren’t let’s-take-it-from-Google ones. Each and every one of them is unique with properly designed soft edges and great selection of colors. When the round sums up, ending animations are smooth and the new bears which you get at the end, after reaching your target scores, comes with a funny and sometimes inappropriate sentences made from the words that you submitted while playing. Sound department isn’t overwhelming but is good enough. Background music is soft, doesn’t gets repetitive and fits the overall gameplay. I can’t say anything about you but the background music reminds me of old arcade games.
Like rest of the artwork user interface too is full of colors and easy to understand. Small thing which this area lacks is explanation of chapters and rounds. The controls are easy and the guidelines provided are enough to understand them, but it takes a while for the user to know that there is a limited energy system and coins too.
The gameplay is brilliant and unique as I haven’t played any game which resembles to this one but there are two things which are stopping it from being perfect. First one is the energy/honey system, I don’t even know why developers do this!! Recharging is extremely slow just to force users towards IAPs. Why can’t they just be depended upon ads and upgrading related IAP? Second one is day dependent stages, will it hurt developer if users end this game in shorted possible time? Or maybe developer made it to be played for few minutes per day.
Overall Alphabear literally would have been an alpha if it wasn’t for those issues. Despite having hatred for puzzle games I incredibly enjoyed the Alphabear. The gameplay is unique, looks are impressive, and everything else, except the waiting part, is good enough to kill your boring time.
Artwork: I’ll give Alphabear a deserving 8.5/10 for its artwork. Artwork is made in such a way that everything looks simple yet attractive. The colors has decent contrast with proper saturation which gives cartoony feeling and makes the game overall pleasant to eyes and joyful to play.
Music and SFX: Alphabear gets a category average 6.5/10 here. This department is the weakest link of this game. I’m not saying that it’s bad but there’s nothing special about it, although it’s soft and doesn’t repetitive which is a good thing but it doesn’t contain anything that can help it to stand out and say “Yeah! I’m better than the rest of the games’ music”.
Story and Originality: I’ll give this game an 8/10 here. This game doesn’t feature any background story to give us the reason why we have to go through chapters and unlock bears, although having it gives a better understanding but it isn’t compulsory for a genre of game like this one. The gameplay is fairly unique, intriguing and I haven’t played any game yet which resembles this one.
General Gameplay: I’ll give Alphabear another 8/10 for the gameplay experience it provides. The gameplay is easy, there isn’t any trick required to get hold of it and it wouldn’t take you long to understand the basics and get into the swing. This rating could have been near nine if the developer would have been more humble with the things that makes users wait which are slow recharging of honey and day dependent events/rounds.
Addictiveness: I’ll give Alphabear a 7.5/10 here. This game is definitely addictive even more for people who like word puzzlers. I would have loved to play it continuously for hours only if it allowed to do so. It’s not only the gameplay area which gets affected by the wait-to-play department because addictiveness too gets a huge setback. I don’t know when the developers will realize that people only gets irritated when something is stopping them from continuous play. If developer want to earn money they can use more ads but forcing users towards in-app purchases is something which moves the users away from the game, eventually resulting in loss as compared to what they would have earned through ads only.
Overall I’ll give Alphabear an 8/10 which is a beta plus rather than an alpha.