Crossovers by POWGI review for PS Vita, PS4, Switch

I have a bit of a dilemma when it comes to Crossovers by POWGI, the latest release from Lightwood Games that?s consumed all my waking hours.

On the one hand, I can see its flaws. Play it long enough, and it?ll start feeling a little repetitive — and not just because, as a puzzle game, you?re expected to do the same thing over and over again. Rather, you start seeing the same patterns repeated regularly. Crossovers is designed to be a mix between a crossword and a jumble: you?re given sets of word pairs, you find the letters where each pair intersect, and you use the resulting letters to form words. It?s all pretty intuitive, even if I?ve made it seem more complex than it actually is.

The problem is that the game often resorts to using the same pairs. If you see ?tri_e? and ?glo_e?, you know it?s going to be a B. Likewise, any time ?ma_or? shows up, it?s so you can get a J or a Y. For one or two puzzles across the 200 here, that would have been fine; that the repeats showed up often enough for me to notice says something about the game.

Or, alternatively, it says something about me and how much I enjoyed Crossovers that I ploughed through all 200 puzzles in under a day.

That, I suspect, should be my actual takeaway from this game. Even the most challenging jumbles can be solved in under five minutes, and many can be solved in a minute or so, which means — if you?re a admitted word nerd like me — that it?s very easy to get sucked in and find out that you?ve just spent an hour solving dozens of word puzzles.

Which, in turn, means my real complaint about Crossovers is that it?s over far too soon. Occasional repetition or not, it?s designed to be addictive for a certain type of person (i.e. me), and before long, you?ll reach the end and wish there was still more to do. If that?s not the sign of a game worth checking out (and, perhaps, that Lightwood Games may want to think about some DLC), I don?t know what is.

Lightwood Games provided us with a Crossovers by POWGI PS4/Vita code for review purposes.