Crossword Explorer Reviews

Too ridiculously easy….but hey Easy enough for kids ….so great right? But wait….unless you want to start over from square zero- because it will not let you jump around … Facebook?

I don’t do Facebook. No one does Facebook anymore. And my teens and younger kids absolutely don’t do Facebook. It’s a Facebook facilitated app? I thought Apple Arcade was independent.

Being logged into Facebook to sync data means my data is being tracked. Don’t quibble over who’s tracking it. Please. And then making it SO easy that of course it’s for kids. It’s like grape flavored vapes. Who exactly is this for? Because i don’t want my child playing an app that requires Facebook login to sync. They should be free to chose their participation in social media, separately from playing games. Why is nothing just exactly what it is anymore? Why is it always that we are being sold to another company. Yuck. We are trying to get them away from gossip disguised as news and conspiracy theories and engage their brains. Teeing them up for Facebook to gather data? No thank you. Very disappointed.

This game is way too easy. I reviewed it once before saying it was not challenging enough, so I’m bored. I kept thinking it would get more difficult, but I’ve done almost 800 and it’s still the same. A developer left a comment saying to message customer service on CrosswordExplorer and ask to “be placed into the more difficult mode.” I did that and received a response back two weeks later saying that this cannot be done and to keep playing the puzzle because “it gets harder.” At what point will I notice a difference between puzzles at level 1 versus 759? They’ve all been the same. What a waste of time and energy.

This game was addictive and entertaining at first, but there are so many small problems that it quickly becomes a source of irritation. First, the game overall is extremely easy—this isn’t a problem itself…until you realize you’re past level 120 and it’s not getting any more challenging. In fact, the only difficulty is either from tricky spellings (no, the abbr. of the state between Washington and California is not “OREG”) or words not widely used anymore (the 46 instances of “SOT”, meaning a drunk person). It feels cheap. And yet, a lot of the words are not ones that kids are going to know or are useful for them to learn (see: words for “drunk”, titles for pop songs, widely-known trivia, etc), so this likely wouldn’t be fun or even educational. And yes, many clues are used repeatedly—I had a string of 3 puzzles in a row that used the same clue. It gets really stale in a game where most puzzles are small 5x5ish ones. The final straw for me was the unskippable animation parade between each level. Another reviewer said that they’re longer than the actual puzzle. That is NOT an exaggeration. What’s worse is that the animations are multi-part and you have to tap the screen to move from one animation to the next until you get to the next puzzle—it just makes it seem like it’s unresponsive to screen input.

Look, it’s just not a good game. Take a pass on this one.

At first I was enjoying the fun small little puzzles, but as I progressed further and further, it never seemed to get any harder. I’m on level 229 and still solving puzzles that were rated “Easy-Peasy”. Seems like the only difficulties are “Super Easy” and “Slightly Less Easy” with a larger “Kinda Not Easy” puzzle thrown in randomly. There’s no consequence for using the power ups aside from a cooldown on 2 out of the 3. But the puzzles are already so easy, I hardly ever need them. The “See Wrong Letters” power up can be enabled for every round so you can essentially spam letters to guess every answer. I’m not a crossword puzzle pro or anything. I like a simple puzzle I feel confident I can complete without having to Google stuff, but this doesn’t have even a little challenge.

I don’t get the whole world countries theme either since the puzzles themselves seem completely unrelated to the country. You’ll often get words repeated from puzzle to puzzle too.

Maybe give this to your kids to play if it’ll hold their attention long enough.

CrosswordExplorer really wants to push one side of the political aisle. It’s heavily Left-leaning. Obama, Biden, Bill Gates…these are all answers. If you’re going to try to be balanced, where is a crossword hint about Trump? One that’s as favorable as the hint for Obama? And when asked about the “actor” in the movie Inception, the answer is SUPPOSED to be Ellen Page, but no, you must put their “preferred” name (which was only announced a couple years ago)—Elliot. Why even add controversial options such as this?

Aside from the extreme biases, the answers are so repetitive. I understand it must be difficult to generate new words, but seriously?

I have enjoyed my time with this game. I have played to about level 250 though and every puzzle is still rated as “easy” and the lowest completion percentage is 84%.

The high completion percentage is easy to understand though because the clues are VERY repetitive. Often there will be identical clues in back-to-back puzzles. I have lost count of the number of times the answer was OREO, OPRAH, or ARENA. Also, I think the creators are obsessed with The Big Bang Theory, there are a huge number of clues associated with it.

In short I wish there were a larger variety of clues and that the difficulty ramped up faster.

I like crossword puzzles but I’ve always been terrible at them and can never finish so I was excited to try this game. Unfortunately, it’s only fun for a couple dozen levels or so. I thought that the difficulty would ramp up over time, but it doesn’t. It’s extremely easy and words repeat surprisingly often. The hint system is also dumb because there is no limit to how many you can use. You can just spam the show word button and “solve” every level that way. Basically no challenge to this game whatsoever. Very disappointed in this one, especially for an Apple Arcade title.

At first, the idea of bite-sized crosswords seemed fun, and it was actually pretty nice to knock out a few puzzles when I needed to kill some time.

However, many words are repeated. And, as I went on, I noticed more and more spelling errors. Not to mention the "traveling to different countries" theme seems incredibly tacked-on, and you can't fast forward or skip the congratulations/ new score screen after EVERY puzzle.

This does not seem a premium game fit for a subscription service, especially compared to the many quality titles available on Apple Arcade. It's a shame, too. I was looking forward to a decent crossword puzzle game.

i enjoy the playing the game and i have enjoyed it until level 40 in india. these creators had the audacity to put one of the puzzles words as “iwas.” with the question of “___ was made for loving you” by tori kelly and ed sheeran; two words. as a person who loves music dearly i would have NEVER guessed the song title with this artist choice. i’ve never once heard this song before nor have i ever seen anything in ads or on a radio station!! i know my fellow music lovers can say that the first song that came to mind was “i was made for loving you” by KISS. one of the most popular rock bands of the times. this upsets me dearly and i cannot stand for this.

If the skill level of the game was better than average I would be ok with the animations between levels being as long as they are. Unfortunately the animations take longer than some of the puzzles do. In addition, I don't give two hoots about my "wisdom level" and it going up does nothing for me. My progression through the game would be enough (if the game was better).

Between the ease of the puzzles and the multitude of clicks and time to get from level to level I wouldn't recommend this to anyone. This game wastes your time waiting on things that don't matter and that is just poor game design. The NYT crossword is worth every penny.

The game seems stable enough & does contain crossword puzzles, of a sort. On the other hand, while 2/3 of the sample game boards shown in CrosswordExplorer Store are at least medium-sized puzzles, out of the first 140+ puzzles I’ve played so far only 4 or 5 have been larger or more complex than the “tiny” (usually 5x5 or 5x6 on the outside) size I assumed at first was a tutorial and later learned with horror was the entire game.

The game appears to contain at least a few larger and/or more challenging puzzles, and each puzzle has an explicit difficulty rating (almost universally “easy peasy”), so adding a setting or feature to allow players to filter by size and/or difficulty would at least allow each player to access what they wanted without forcing their way through the parts they don’t. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to skip a puzzle in the current version; it’s all, in order, or quit.

First off I love the game I am on level 300 I am so addicted I could play for hours. I do though have a few things that I kinda hate about the game. The first thing is a lot of words are misspelled so you cant really guess them correctly. No it wasn’t me I made sure to Google the words and make sure I was right and I was for example on one level errors is spelled errs ?. I don’t know who controls the words but maybe spell check them before posting a round because it seriously takes away from the joy of the game. Second make the rounds harder. I mean I’m at level 300 and have still never hit a hard puzzle that I couldn’t finish in under a minute. It would be nice to have more challenging puzzles as you advance or a way to change the difficult

Daily challenges, I get done with them within like, 30 seconds. I want more levels to play, because you guys have been telling me that more levels are coming ever since I finished the game around January. I asked you guys a few months ago to please make more, but nothing happened and now it’s June. I’m a very patient person, so it’s fine if you guys really are trying to make for levels, but if you’re not, please try to make more. Thank you so much for listening and hopefully meeting my wants and needs for this game. I hope it goes well to make more levels, and again, if you guys really are trying, I will be patient. This game is so much fun and I speed through the game, unfortunately for me… If you guys make more levels, I will definitely give it 5 stars! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

As many other reviewers have stated, this game is way too easy. I’ve played 45 puzzles hoping to get to something more challenging, but each one still is rated “easy” and takes no more than 15-30 seconds to complete. The trek from country to country isn’t compelling enough to keep going with the hope that the puzzles will become even slightly puzzling. I’ll check back in a few months to see if it’s been updated to add higher difficulty levels, but I’ll be uninstalling for now.

I'm on puzzle 208 and nearly every puzzle for some reason has at least one clue now linking to the Big Bang Theory show? For seemingly no reason? You can say "Stockholm ___" and have that be a clue without connecting it to one specific BBT episode, I'm sure more people are familiar with the concept of Stockholm Syndrome than are fans of BBT who will immediately think of the episode?? We've reached a point where so many clues nonsensically connect to BBT that I'm more annoyed than entertained by the game

I like the puzzles because there are no ads, and I like the themes. These puzzles would be great for a younger group because there is so very much repetition. So for me there’s little challenge but for my grandchildren, the repetition would make good reinforcement. I would love to see one improvement to the physical set up, and that is to place the button that puts letters in moved from the bottom right because I keep hitting it by mistake and messing up the game. All said and done, I still play these puzzles every day!

This game is, as others have said, easy for a long time. I’m on level 394. There are harder levels mixed in, but most are fairly easy to finish in seconds.

I love this game because it my go-to sitting game. Sitting at the DMV? In the dr. office? On a park bench? At the airport? On the toilet?

This game is great for passing the time anywhere. I do wish the levels were harder, and I hope they add it in at some point, but this game is aesthetically pleasing and fun to play.

As ppl have stated this game and the puzzles are pretty easy BUT I think the best part of this game is the fact that you can do them quickly. Most games you have to put time into but this one you can do waiting in line for your favorite food truck & I think that’s why it’s worth 5 stars. Simple & satisfying as the saying goes. Download it & try it out next time your waiting in line for your bank teller, or fav food truck. You’ll love that aspect of this game; and maybe learn a thing or 2.

I always wanted to do crosswords but they seemed too hard and more like a chore than fun. I just thought that maybe they were not for me but then I found this tiny crossword app game. This was just what I was looking for! It is quick, fun, easy yet thought provoking. I just started and have learned quite a few things that I had to google. Everything is not for everybody. I felt compelled to write a review since I was having so much fun and was grateful to finally be able to do crosswords. Keep up the good work! I will definitely be playing every day. This is a great game that relaxes you and takes you away from all the things you have to do everyday. Thanks again and I wish you abundant blessings in all your future endeavors.

Please please please change puzzle 500. There is a clue that mentions a well-known case of animal abuse in 1950s. If you had checked you’d know this is a horrid story for a lot of people. You may have only cared about the propaganda. At least allow us to skip a puzzle. I will not play again until this is addressed. Please don’t make me change my 5 star rating!!!

Other reviewers mentioned too much animation. Im not sure what they are referring to but there is none for me. There are two screens between each puzzle. One shows the completed puzzle, and the next has some menu options. The puzzles do get more difficult but slowly. I’m to the “ 75% completed this puzzle” the first ones are 96%. There are a few repeated clues but I saw this as part of the prep to make it through the more difficult puzzles