In this hectic world we live in, many times work and appointments must come before the fun and joys in our lives, including that of getting to play videogames whenever we want. Gone are the days when we could fire up a game of our choice and spend hours toiling away – now we seem to game in stolen moments here and there. With that in mind, perhaps it is no wonder that casual games have become such a popular gaming choice (especially with women who make up the vast majority of casual game players), as casual games allow us to either jump in and get those quick fixes of gaming bliss or either play them for as long as we want when we do have the time. In honor of the casual game, we'll be bringing you a new Casual Game of the Week every Monday to help you find that fix you might be needing in your life, and this week we have: Words Kingdom

Life was normal for a time, but that was all before the barbarians came, enslaving all the people of your land. You was nothing more than a young boy when the barbarians first came, but you would grow up with grand ambitions, namely taking back your country and pushing back the barbarian forces. As a grown man it's now time to make your move and reclaim your country.

Casual games usually don't have much of a story, but it's always nice when one tries to tie story into gameplay, and Words Kingdom does just that. The story is told with some hand drawn images, which look good enough, but aren't very stylized at all. The story images are more like those you'd find in a young child's book than anything else; whether or not the style was done on purpose or if it's just a matter of the artist not being up to snuff is a mystery that will remain.

As for the gameplay, nothing different is really presented with Word Games, as the game plays like most other word puzzle games, though the formula is tweaked ever so slightly to give it a little of that new game smell. You'll be presented with a board filled with letters and it's your job to connect letters so that you can make words. The purpose of making words is so that you can get rid of the barbarians occupying a piece of your land, which are represented as points. For example, if you need 10,000 points to beat a level, you have to make enough words to get 10,000 points, which act as if you have killed 10,000 barbarians. You make words by clicking on letters that are attached to each other, and thankfully the game lets you go diagonally instead or just horizontally and vertically, which opens up more opportunities to make words and not get stumped…though you will find yourself doing nothing but looking at tiles if your vocabulary is rather limited.

The biggest problem with Words Kingdom comes from the fact that there are so many things on the screen and different variables, that some things are only discovered more by trial and error than anything else, as the game doesn't do a good enough job of telling you what to do, choosing instead to give you a very bare minimum tutorial, which is really just three pages of text telling you to make words – not what everything means. Do I have unlimited time? Nope, some strange meter on the left releasing steam signals your time? Why does my character offer word opportunities and what are they for? What is with the shrinking yellow line under the letter board? What are the crowns for on the right side? What are the hearts for that matter used for in the game? Why are there dots on some tiles and not others and what are they for? There are just too many variables messing up what should be a pretty simple concept and hampering the fluidity of the gameplay.

The game quickly gets harder after only about three levels, as the barbarian points total keeps getting higher and higher and your time seems to stay the same or gets shorter. It's hard to pinpoint just how much time you have, as the only clues are visual (an ever decreasing graphic) and one audio cue (a constant ticking when you're about out of time). Part of the difficulty comes from not getting too many points for three or four letter words, but it just seems like the game is hampering you still, not giving you enough time to do anything or really think things over.

Graphically, as stated, the game has several drawings which look a bit amateurish, and the main game board is just a guy standing there and a grid board with letters on it and lots of blank space. There also isn't much to talk about in terms of audio, other than some background music that sounds pretty nice, as there is no vocals and the sound effects are limited to mostly chimes and plinks from making words.

If you're a fan of word games you might enjoy some of the gameplay mechanics of Words Kingdom if you can experiment around with them and properly understand every single nuisance, but others might find themselves getting angry at the limited amount of time you get per level to beat it and the overall lack of polish and substance from technical standpoints too.

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