Game Play: maybe you want it this way, but the animations are an impediment to gameplay. I like to type the words, and in a timed situation, typing quickly should be an asset to the player. The animations make good players worse, even on first guesses before you slow the animations. I like slowing the player after multiple bad guesses, but don't hamstring us from the start.
Word Lists: far too many plurals. Especially in the games you rate as more challenging, plurals render the game dull. There are plenty of interesting and difficult 5-letter patterns in English that make this type of game better.
Stars: this seems like an afterthought. I had done four or five of these puzzles before I realized what the mechanism for the stars was. Even when the summary screen showed that I finished with x number of stars, I really only cared about how quickly I was able to complete the puzzle. It is good that time is the overall measure in your game, but I found that I cared very little about stars in the end.
Overall a nice iteration on the Scrabble/Boggle/Wordle paradigm.
Word Lists: far too many plurals. Especially in the games you rate as more challenging, plurals render the game dull. There are plenty of interesting and difficult 5-letter patterns in English that make this type of game better.
Stars: this seems like an afterthought. I had done four or five of these puzzles before I realized what the mechanism for the stars was. Even when the summary screen showed that I finished with x number of stars, I really only cared about how quickly I was able to complete the puzzle. It is good that time is the overall measure in your game, but I found that I cared very little about stars in the end.
Overall a nice iteration on the Scrabble/Boggle/Wordle paradigm.