Decent word game but with some 1.0 flaws

Im a sucker for games like these where you build words out of random letters so I decided to give it a shot. However, I found a few things frustrating.

1) The time-counter is way too small so you have to devote equal time to looking for letters while keeping your attention on the small font used for the counter. Another thing about the counter is that when youve only got a handful of seconds left, it never warns you so you may think you have more time than you really do -- which leads you to lose a life. Solution: Increase the size of the counter and change the counter font color to red along with a warning sound at 10 seconds (maybe even a quick pulse of the seconds) to notify the player.

2) With the sound off, its almost impossible to tell if youve hit the right letter without looking up at the top. But while youre timed, youre more worried about getting all the letters spelled out than devoting energy to looking up at the word. Solution: When a tile is tapped (upon touch), the file should fade a bit to notify the player that the tile is actually active.

3) "Backspacing" is eternally frustrating. You have to hit the same letter you used before to backspace? With limited time, its extremely difficult to pinpoint the letter you used 3 letters ago in a random grid of tiles. For example, if I spelled the word, "mustard," and I wanted to delete the letters "a, r, d" to form "must," Id have to go and find each one in the grid. This takes even more time to find the right tile when all I want to do is backspace. And no, erasing the whole word just to spell a word Ive already partially spelled is NOT a solution. Solution: Add a backspace button!

4) Peek. Peek is useful, I suppose... but I havent ever really used it. Why not? It just seems like it would be useful if only I had more time to think about how to utilize it in a clever way. But with only 30 seconds for each "life," it seems like Id be better off just spelling random words on whatever tiles I can see already. Solution: Either increase the allotted time or allow more peeks per round.

5) The "reset to clear" sound is kind of annoying.. this may be a personal thing but it just seems like its distracting. It sounds a bit bizarre like a laser gun reloading.. out of place in a game/atmosphere like this. Solution: Different sound, please.

Honestly, I dont know how any of these things were missed by the developer, seems like common sense to me after a few trial runs of the game. The game really is good for a word game so I give it 3 stars but these flaws seem kind of obvious to me.

kguy90 about Wordology