The word games keep on coming, it’s a pretty competitive space at this point in App Store history, but Castle Arcadium is throwing their hat into the ring with a worthy competitor: Hooked on Words. With iCloud sync capabilities, enabling you to save your games for play on any of your iDevices as well as the usual Game Center functionality, the game comes with all the signs of a polished product. Throw in social media integration to share your game progress on facebook and twitter, and you might just get the impression that Arcadium is looking to establish itself as a serious player in this word search game.

Hooked on Words comes in four flavours, each seemingly crafted with a certain type of gamer in mind. Standard mode is your classic game of word search. Random tiles will be generated on screen, and players will be scored on how quickly they can chain letters together in order to create words. The more tiles that can be strung together at any one time, the more points the player gets, so the longer the word, the better. Second is timed mode, it tests the player’s ability to perform the same task under pressure. Two minutes are thrown on the clock along with an unlimited supply of lettered tiles for the player to throw his mind at. This time, scoring is calculated based upon how many words the player is able to create within that limited amount of time, so think fast and move faster if you want those bragging rights.

While timed and standard modes may seem familiar, the next two are more unique. Collapse mode throws a bit of Tetris into the mix. This time, tiles will be raining down from above, constantly trying to overrun the screen while the player frantically tries to clear all tiles before that can happen. While a adopting a strategy similar to timed mode may have its advantages here, players will have to take the fact that clearing longer words will also clear bonus tiles from the game screen into consideration. This mode will test your ability to not only quickly string words together, but balance the length of said words for the best final result.

Scramble mode is the last flavour of Hooked on Words, and it’s a plain challenge to test the players vocabulary. No tricks this time, you are presented with a six by seven board of tiles which don’t change and the clock is set to 2 minutes. Within those two minutes, the player must find as many words as possible, a bit like timed mode but without the benefit of constantly having new letters to work with if you get stuck. While a bit more standard than perhaps even standard mode, this one is sure to present a challenge to the word search purists out there.

Castle Arcadium say that the game should hit the App Store later today, June 28th and will be absolutely free to play. As a universal app for both iPhone and iPad, the barriers to entry are set pretty low, unless you don’t have an iOS device.

For more information about Hooked on Words, check out their official website.