Word puzzle games need more than just challenging word puzzles and interesting play modes. They need a good storyline and a compelling reason to play on. Breaking News provides that reason. When you assemble combinations of letters into words in this game, you’re broadcasting the latest news stories on TV, and the faster you play, the sooner you put out your latest exclusives. It’s a simple matter of dragging the rows and columns of a letter grid until you line up all the letters of each word, connecting up, down, left or right – you have plenty of flexibility in how you join up the word. It’s a simple system, and all you have to do is finish all the words in the news stories under the deadline.

Breaking News also incorporates a historical element in its “Adventure” mode. You start out in 1950 with a rickety shack for a TV studio, but as the years go by and you make more money, you can buy upgrades to improve your studio. As the decades roll by, you get to report on major events like the first moon landing, and you will also get to see your broadcast news operation become a modern, world-spanning institution. That’s certainly a story worth seeing, and the game levels are interspersed with cut-scenes and historical photos to evoke the mood of the changing times.

As the years roll on, the words get longer, you get special bonus tiles to help you earn more money, complete long words and gain more time. But there are also complications with locked tiles that prevent certain rows and columns from being moved until you match them up with a key tile. You’ll need a sharp eye and a fast mind to continue matching letters while working around those locked tiles, which can get quite tricky.

The music for Breaking News evokes the fast-paced themes of all the big primetime news programs and gets your pulse racing as the clock counts down. The music shifts to a final countdown when the clock is running out, too – it really sells the “as fast as you can” aspect of Breaking News.

We only wished that certain turns of phrase and certain news stories didn’t keep repeating so often – it seems like every other year, some new species of animal gets discovered, or another new science fiction novel makes the headlines. It’s only in these moments that the game gets repetitive. But apart from that, it’s a very compelling word search game that incorporates real history and lots of entertaining news headlines, along with enough special tiles and gameplay tricks to hook you through 50 years of broadcast news headlines, and then some.

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