With the new school year starting soon, it’s a great time to help your kids brush up on their reading and spelling skills.  It’s LetterHero to the rescue!  This spelling action game is available to download for iOS devices (review on iPad here) and adults can enjoy it, too!

Letters scroll by on the bottom of the screen, and you must tap them to make words.  Once you spell a word, tap on it and you’ll earn points.  If you spelled something that isn’t a word, you’ll hear a buzzer sound and you must swipe it left or right to throw it away and start anew.  Each time you spell a word, you’ll score points.  The longer and more complicated the word, the more points you’ll earn.  You’ll have a couple of minutes to spell as many words as you can, and when time’s over, the game tallies your score and you can start again.  There are also in-game achievements you can earn by performing certain tasks.

Every so often a power up may scroll by along with the letters.  Tap them to activate their powers.  Some help you erase letters or words, speed up or slow down the scrolling, or let you have a ‘wild card’ letter.  Only problem is that it’s sometimes hard to know which power icons do what.  The other problem with this game is that it feels a bit amateurish, like the glut of iOS games already out there (there’s a lot of games that play just like this, too).  But otherwise it’s still a fairly decent diversion that’ll keep you entertained for a little while.

Kid Factor:

Naturally, reading, spelling, and letter recognition skills are needed to play.  But the game can be considered educational as it reinforces those skills.  Some kids might get bored at the repetitive and simple gameplay, though.

Tags: Game Reviews