Michal Ždanský Almost everyone played the Hangman word game as a child, either at school or among friends. You try letters to guess a word, and if you miss a certain number of attempts to guess the letters, you will be punished in the form of a hanged stick figure on paper or a blackboard. Times have progressed a bit since our youth and you can play hangman on your apple phone/player too.
Like the game itself, its mobile handling is quite simple, and I mean that in a positive way. After all, just an important game, not dozens of options and offers. Nevertheless, we can find some here.
We are first greeted by a menu with a gallows in the foreground and a church with an adjacent cemetery in the background. The whole menu fit nicely on the board nailed to the gallows, but it is a bit smaller and it may be difficult for some to click on the individual offers. In the settings, we can find the option to change the orientation of the display, turn off the sounds (which are otherwise modest) and choose the language. Yes, the entire game is bilingual, we can guess words in both Czech and English. There are over 4000 words here, so we don't have to worry that they will start repeating themselves after playing for a while.
Once you've chosen your preferred language, all you have to do is start guessing. If you have already played the game, you can continue it or start from scratch. Otherwise, your previous game will be overwritten without warning.
In the new game, we have three levels of difficulty to choose from. The first - the easiest - will offer us simpler words, several help options, i.e. elimination of letters, more lives and a description of the word. In the other two difficulties, the number of lives and hints decreases and, conversely, the number of words in one round increases. In the last, "veteran" level, don't count on any description of the word, only a hint will help you, which, of course, you may only use once.
The game itself then takes place by selecting letters from the menu, where after a successful guess the letter is added to the dotted field, otherwise you lose a life. You are right to wonder, there is no visual representation of the hangman. The game only tells you that you lost and what the guessed word actually was. This kind of loses the whole charm of the game, after all, after the gradually appearing hanged figure, the whole game is.
Let the option of multiplayer or duel patch them up for you, if you want. It takes place on one device in such a way that one of you comes up with a word and the other has to guess it.
For each round won, you get a certain number of points depending on the difficulty, the use of hints and the lives lost. The game ends when you fail to guess the word and the total score is saved both locally and on the integrated OpenFeint leaderboard.
As for the sound side, apart from the so-called clicking sounds, the game is eerily silent. So you can make playing more enjoyable at least with music from the player, for which the authors have prepared simple controls.
Otherwise, if you like gallows humor, I recommend you take a good look at the main screen, where one quite funny thing is hiding. The game is available in the App Store for a reasonable price of €0,79.
iTunes link - €0,79/Free
