Thank you Lightwood Games for sending us a review code.

Words searches always seem to feel right at home on the 3DS. Using a stylus on a touch screen perfectly encapsulates the pen and paper game. Unfortunately, it can be a hard sell when you could just buy physical word search puzzle books and get the same experience.

The Epic Word Search Collection 2 mashes 16 individual puzzles into one, giant puzzle layout. Each puzzle is fit into a 4x4 square, and the player is tasked with finding all the words. As anyone could have guessed, no skill is required for a word search. It will usually boil down to how much patience the player is willing to expend. Each epic puzzle contains over 1500 words. That means there's over 5000 words to be found in total.

There are five different themes of puzzles to choose from. 

Epic America Word Search has you looking for all kinds of words dealing with North America.

Epic Ancient Word Search has many different words relating to ancient history and their gods (Greek, Roman, etc) that must be found. 

Epic Animals Word Search has you tracking down hundreds of different names of animals. 

Epic Journeys Word Search contains things you may find across the Earth, and not actually about the band, Journey. 

Lastly, Epic Shakespeare Word Search has the player looking for different words relating to Shakespeare and his many plays.

Now, because the puzzles are so large, they can't be seen all at once on the screen. Scrolling with the circle pad reveals the games built-in hint system. At any given moment, when you're not scrolling, every word that can be found at that moment will be listed. As you scroll around the puzzle certain words may be unlisted, which at first is very confusing. Also words found automatically disappear from the list. This caught me completely off guard, and I questioned if I was even finding the correct words for a given section of the puzzle.

The music in game ranges from mildly okay to extremely grating. This made my time with the game much less enjoyable. If I'm expected to sit for hours looking for hidden words, I'd like to listen to something that doesn't make me instantly want to disable the music. To be fair, there was a track or two that I did enjoy. The downside being all the tracks are on a single loop, so it wasn't worth waiting for them to cycle through.

Ultimately, like many other word search games, the fun factor can run out nearly immediately. The people that Epic Word Search Collection 2 will appeal to is incredibly small. Most gamers have no reason to buy this game when many free alternatives are available on smart phones. It's hard to justify paying $8 for this game. For that price, one could easily just buy eight word search books from a dollar store. You would most likely get more puzzles that way too. 

-Kyuremu