Cryptogram: Word Brain Puzzle 12+

This game would be five stars if the ads could chill. They are so long and annoying, and ironically? oftentimes the games advertised claim to be “ad-free”. I don’t believe it personally, because they’re misleading to begin with. (The game with the mom and the baby in the snowstorm? Yeah, that actually does NOT exist, folks.) But if this is true, then surely this game doesn’t need ads. Really it would just be an improvement if you could exit out of them after ten or so seconds, like the case is for other games. Anyway, this is the one reason I can’t give the game five stars, and also no, I’m not going to spend a portion of my money for the premium version of a word game.
I acknowledge that this is one way game designers make an income, but there has to be a better way to handle it, right? Like I said, at least give us the option to x out of the ad after 10-20 seconds…and if Apple could maybe pay the designers more, that would help. But that’d be an ethical decision and Apple’s CEO is anything but that.

Let me say I enjoy the game itself. I play it daily. The puzzles are fun - even if they still aren’t very challenging as of level 193. ****My issue is the ABSURD amount of ads. I’d give it 5 stars if not for that. I do understand the reason for ads. But one at the end of every level + one before you start the next is bad enough. Like just one in between should suffice but whatever I’ll watch two in a row... But several “Ad Breaks” throughout while you’re in the middle of a puzzle on top of that? WHY? That’s just too much. The ads slow the game down massively. Sometimes it will crash and restart a puzzle I was nearly done with or it’ll lag so badly I have to relaunch the app. It’s also very annoying and distracting when you’ve got a train of thought going solving a puzzle, you’re trying to enter in a letter and suddenly an ad breaks in and it’s like 10 mins long and when it’s finally over you don’t even remember what you were doing! Bug to fix: Could the timer please stop when you close the app or close your phone? I can’t always finish a puzzle before I stop playing. The timer will keep going - sometimes all night and then say it took me 12 hours to complete the puzzle - which throws off my average time. It’s not the biggest deal in the world but if you’re going to have a feature in your app it might as well work properly.

The idea seems really unique and cool but whether it is a flaw in design or the nature of the puzzle many puzzles are literally unsolvable without blind guessing and hints. You are often left in a position where you are effectively playing hangman but unlike hangman you have to guess the letter and where it goes to get confirmation. Ive had multiple puzzles where it started with only 2 letters and both were already completed so i had no possible way of placing a single letter without random guessing. You can do minesweeper deduction logic where you make assumptions and see if they make sense but without the ability to play letters in the wrong spot instead of just being told you are wrong that is impractical. If i could turn autocheck off it would be an alright puzzle game but with it on the game is just a lot of random guessing or watching ads for hints to get an actually reasonable number of starting letters.

Above all that the ads are so intrusive trying to navigate the menu to pick a category requires watching sometimes 4+ ads in a 30 second period. Thats not a huge problem though because if the game is good i would just pay to remove ads but its not so its not worth it.