The well-read word-building brawler Writer Rumble from GameFly / Feel Every Yummy has just gone free-to-play with characters Edgar and Agatha available to all players with the free download.
This Street Fighter meets Boggle mashup pits players head to head (or against the AI) in a best of 3 round word-finding battle, complete with crazy power ups that block your opponent’s tiles, flip them upside down or just give your words twice the power.
Since its release last November, this unique and fun word game only cost a dollar, but now Writer Rumble is free, ad-supported and there is a 99¢ IAP of Core Characters, which unlocks The Brothers, Jane, Homer, and Howard and removes ads. Anyone who previously purchased Writer Rumble when it was a paid app has already been automatically updated to the ad-free version with the Core Characters, so you can ignore the IAP. Hopefully the fact that these have been designated as the “Core” characters that more character sets are on the way.
It is likely that Writer Rumble was seeing some competition from PopCap’s slightly similar (but free and more recently released) Bookworm Heroes. Going freemium is a great thing for all players as it means that since the game is free, there are likely to me many more active random players to challenge in the game’s real-time online multiplayer match-ups. This is the one issue I had in the past with the game.
I tried deleting and re-downloading the app on my device and I didn’t need to do anything special to unlock all of the characters, so whatever they did for previous paid app players seems to work seamlessly whether or not the app is still on your device.
If you still haven’t played this wonderfully creative game yet, then now is definitely the time to give it a shot.