Whether you love them or hate them, chances are you have completed a word search sometime in your life – or at least attempted to. They have been around forever, so they must have a pretty big following. As is usually the case, that fact alone is reason enough for a WiiWare game. Is Word Searcher worthy of your detective skills, or should you just stick to the books for sale by the cashiers?

Starting a game of Word Searcher is basically the same as opening a word search book. You simply select a topic that interests you (from one-hundred in total) covering such subjects as anatomy, winter sports and even onomatopoeias, then dive right into the task of finding the hidden words amongst the scrambled mess of letters. The entire game is played with the Wiimote pointer, so selecting words is as easy as highlighting the respective letters. Meanwhile, a timer in the corner of the screen will constantly remind you just how long you are taking to solve the word search – the faster you decipher it, the more points you gain.

It’d be pretty foolish to expect a word search game to have amazing visuals, so Word Searcher is a success in that it looks about as plain as the books it’s modeled after. The menus are minimal, with large buttons and a standard pointer, and the playing field is the expected heap of random letters. Perhaps a bit more attractive is the accompanying jazzy electro music which is surprisingly better than a lot of WiiWare offerings, but the constant looping begins to grow tiresome.

The fact that Word Searcher is only 500 points (equivalent to $5.00) saves it from being completely overlooked since most word search books cost at least that much. Besides, a pencil’s motion controls are far less intuitive than the Wiimote’s! Word search aficionados and casual fans alike would do well to purchase Word Searcher, but anybody who hasn’t enjoyed them in the past will likely not experience anything to change their mind.