A long time favorite for passing a boring day at work or lazy weekend afternoon at home is opening the paper to find the daily crossword puzzle to mull over. The little word teasers provide a little mental exercise and at times enough frustration to snap the lead off your pencil. The paper and pencil have now advanced to a new media, your Xbox Live Arcade games library. Coffeetime Crosswords isn’t bringing anything new to the word puzzle genre, but it does employ all the wonderful word plays and associations used in the normal crosswords.

Gameplay:

The gameplay consists of, well basically entering letters into their respective slots to from words either vertically or horizontally. I’m sure we all pretty much new that. Coffeetime Crosswords starts out by allowing the player to pick from one of four different difficulties, Super Easy, Easy, Medium, and Difficult. Each of these settings has 45 different puzzles to choose from for your inner word nerd. The clues and words aren’t too laborious to figure out, even on the hardest level. When you choose a box to place your letter an alphabet wheel pops up that uses the same technique that the “old school” hand labelers and secret decoder utilized. The controls are easy to use, but feel a bit awkward scrolling between letters of the alphabet because they are broken up between 2 rings of letters (A-M and N-Z). A major downfall of the game is that there is no in game save feature. XBLA games are supposed to be about easy access for players to pop in and out of, but not being able to save a game midway through a 70 question puzzle seems like they are forcing the players to play it all or not at all. Single player only offers the normal and time challenge modes which seem skimpy for the amount of Microsoft points you are giving up. The only multiplayer mode available is co-op puzzle solving which can only be played via Xbox Live.

Graphics:

The sights of Coffeetime Crosswords aren’t going to awe the optic neural pathways the way some other Xbox Live Arcade games have done in the past. The game gives clear and crisp visuals so that you can view your puzzle without too much clutter or blurring. One good thing about the game is that you can choose from one of five different backgrounds that lend a perfect aesthetic effect to your puzzles.

Sound:

Considering that there is only one song that loops through the entirety of gameplay you may want to consider muting your television. After 30 minutes of the same song your focus can shift from finding the right word to the repetitive drone of crossword puzzle music. The sound effects provided by selecting and placing a letter sound just like the old rotary dial phones used by your Grandparents back in the day. Factor in both the background music and the resound of letter selecting you may end up muting the television in favor of local traffic or community noises.

Longevity:

The game offers 180 puzzles through 4 different difficulty levels and 2 different game modes will leave the crossword enthusiast with plenty of word searching. The multiplayer modes are severally lacking and unless you have another word nerd friend on XBL you won’t be able to find a match. There is an tab in the game for some downloadable content, so there may be some more puzzle types heading down the pipeline.

Overall:

While the game is almost as fun as playing with a pencil and paper, it just seems to be lacking a personality that will leave you wanting to play puzzle after puzzle. The controls work, but they seem to break up the flow of the game when switching from one alphabet dial to the next. There are plenty of puzzles to play, but without people to play the game with I’d rather stick to the old school newspaper version. The sights and sounds of Coffeetime Crosswords are average at best, but if you really expected more from a puzzle game in this category you must be one tough cookie to please. When you can find “FREE” crossword puzzle games over the Internet the $10.00 price tag this game totes doesn’t seem reasonable. Unless you are a crossword nut I’d suggest you think of a 4 letter word about skipping this game...PASS.