Dive into the wonderful world of crosswords with CodyCross, a free-to-play mobile game. CodyCross offers a simplified crossword experience with easier and faster puzzles than a traditional crossword. Enjoy tons of free puzzles with optional power-ups to help if you get stuck!

Format: Android via Google Play
Cost: Free-to-Play
Pressure to Pay: Low, read below for details

Released by Fanatee, Inc.

Quick Overview

Worlds have 100 puzzles divided into 20 areas

In-depth Review

CodyCross is a free-to-play mobile game featuring simplified crossword puzzles. Puzzles consist of about a dozen words of the same length, which are aligned to reveal a meta-answer when fully completed. Puzzles vary in terms of how long the words they’re composed of are and different themes for the meta-answer. There’s an extensive adventure mode, as well as new paid packs that come out weekly. The first puzzle of the weekly packs is always free. I’m nowhere near completing the adventure mode, but I like trying out the free puzzle and the new puzzle packs as they come out. Puzzle packs have three different difficulties.

Previous weekly puzzle packs remain available

I really enjoyed the good spread of word categories, everything from science to pop culture to history. I definitely do a lot better with science or technology since as that’s what my background is in. I usually have to ask for help on the pop culture ones, unless I can brute force it or make an educated guess via the letters that get filled in.

Puzzle from the 2nd of 40 adventure worlds

One of the features that I’m kind of torn on is a main feature of the game where upon completing a word, some of the letters from that word will fill into other words. This is super helpful when the player has no idea what clue means and gets them more letters to help figure it out, especially if the clue is a little vague. But when I first run through the clues in order and I haven’t even looked at the bottom clues, I find it kind of frustrating that sometimes I can figure out what a word is before even seeing the clue for it, just because so many letters have gotten filled in already. So in some cases, it’s super helpful. In other cases, it makes the puzzle too easy.

Example spread of letters from one answer

In general, the difficulty was one of the things that I struggled with. Certainly, there are words that I just don’t know because I just have no background in whatever that clue is about. For me, that’s usually pop culture ones, I don’t have a lot of trivia knowledge to consider myself good at crosswords. I’m usually able to complete one of the adventure puzzles and about five minutes which feels a little bit too easy. I think a lot of the people that are attracted to crossword puzzles won’t be challenged enough. It’s certainly good for people like me, who aren’t hardcore about them, but those sorts of people may not pick up.

It’s unclear what ‘hard mode’ in the settings does

There are a number of power-ups in the game that are also designed to help the player. The power-ups don’t really encourage the player because they can either look up answers online or brute force. Brute force is made possible by the fact that the game will reject an answer as soon as it’s entered if it’s incorrect.

Completing a puzzle and meta-answer

Outside of the tutorial I have never used any of the power-ups. In general, players only get enough coins to get one or two power-ups per day. Potentially more if they’re willing to watch ads or pay. Paying also removes the ads, which occasionally play between levels, and grants access to all of the weekly puzzle packs previously mentioned.

Subscription options

Recommendation

Overall, I liked the huge number of puzzles available in CodyCross. There’s also a good spread of word categories to challenge. It also innately helps players reveal difficult words, and there are new packs that can be accessed every week if they’re willing to purchase a subscription. However, I often found the puzzles weren’t very challenging and that the power-ups were pretty limited in their use. I recommend CodyCross to players looking for easier crossword puzzles, particularly those who would rather play a large number of puzzles over single difficult ones and are looking for a puzzle game that they can quickly hop in and out of with shorter puzzle sessions.