Alphabear: Words Across Time

This is one of the most highly polished and feature rich games on the iOS store. This game is free, which is ridiculous as there’s no intrusive ads or forced video watching. Instead they gamify the ad experience with some hilariously meta commentary that has me actually watching ads because I want to contribute to “TV time!” I’m going to “purchase” this game (disabling ads is a little steep at $9.99) but I want to really help this developer be successful. It’s great to learn new words too, which this game has helped me do. The only negative I’ve found so far is that with someone who has a larger (more verbose!) vocabulary, the game doesn’t really reward you for going way above the required score at the beginning. I’ll sometimes end up with a few thousand points over the limit and a fully completed tile (the largest “biggest bear award”) but I don’t really get rewarded for it aside from some cloth. Would be nice to have the game acknowledge more power players in the early stages and perhaps unlock the medium and difficult modes a little earlier (I’m still on easy as I haven’t progressed to the later chapters yet despite nearly always acing each stage). Aside from that—this is one of the best and most polished apps on the iOS store and I'm very happy to support it!

This is an amazing game with great graphics and a fun story to keep you just interested enough to play but not enough to be a problem or get in the way of the gameplay. The unique bears, tv time function, rechargeable honey, and special events add a little something that other games don’t have. I’ve only gotten one or two intrusive ads in the month or so I’ve been playing this game. I’m just wondering if you could have a feature to make your own levels or bears that can be unlocked by helping people out by, say, sending them honey. You could friend people and send gifts to earn custom bears. Or maybe there’s a different currency, say, candies, and you can pay a certain amount of candies to make a custom bear. Then you have different levels of items and accessories and powers. Common level stuff is free but rare, epic, and legendary bears cost candies. You can earn candies through tournaments and by competing with your friends. Overall I love the game, so do my friends and family, and I can’t wait to see what the developers have in store!

I am glad they came out with a new version as I liked the original and was disappointed when it ended. A few things I would change are the inability to fast forward through the storyline parts. They can be quite long if you don’t really care about time traveling bears. Also, you can buy coins to boost your bears, but there is no way seemingly to buy honey to play games when you run out? You are capped at how many ads you can watch for honey, so you are limited as to how much you can play-even if you are willing to pay. If you played through the last version, you won’t be challenged very much at the first few chapters. I am on chapter 3 and have yet to not win on my first try-but I am reminding myself of strategy, saving boosts and upping my bears for the more challenging levels I know are ahead.

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I much preferred the first Alphabears game. What annoys me about this second one and why I stopped playing it is that they disallow you from bingeing on the game. You can kind of binge for the first few levels, but they’ve created ways to slow and stop your progress starting at level 4 so it takes much longer for you to get through it. It’s probably a financial reason, so they get more longevity (ad views and such) out of each player or something like that. But I went from super excited to frustrated to “meh, never mind.” I don’t have the desire to check in on a game daily for months so I can play the few boards they dole out that day. I even looked at purchasing the game ($10 ain’t cheap) but you still can’t binge—no infinite honey. So why the heck would I buy the game??? I’ll be honest, I’m bummed—I was looking forward to this. But I’ve deleted it off my phone and iPad because it feels like an obligation—one more task I have to do for the day. And when I do want to sit down and do something mindless for a few hours, I get to play a handful of boards and I’m forced to be done. Lame. 👎🏻👎🏻👎🏻

This game is fun but it has too many in-game currencies. I dislike the reason posted on the website about removing infinite honey for the players health. Nonsense. What would be great for our health is to not be encouraged to waste real money on digital coins, coffees, and cloth packs. I am happy to pay for a good game and did pay to remove ads. I will not be paying more money for various bear goods and wish there was an option to hide the shop and turn off time-limited deal pop-ups. Otherwise, the game is fun to play. The bears are very cute. The addition of the dictionary in this version is great. I love learning what words mean. There are occasions where valid words are restricted (usually “bad” words). Sometimes there words that are valid but don’t feel like they should be (“uey” and proper nouns like “Noah”). Some sources don’t seem reputable but this may be down to API costs. I imagine Oxford Dictionary costs more to access than Wordnik. If there was an option to choose a source I’d gladly pay for it.