Review: the Only Connect App

There's a new Only Connect app in town! For £1.49 on iOS (£1.99 on Android) you can get your connecting wall fix on the go while a new challenge mode adds some missing vowels to proceedings. It's a solid app, with a respectable chunk of content, just don't expect anything revolutionary.

The app's home screen complete with non-round numbers.

The basics

An Only Connect app is always going to be about the walls and there are a whopping 108 included (the previous version stopped at just 40). 66 of these are presented as 'standalone' walls while the remaining 42 are included in the all-new 'challenge' mode.

Standalone walls are as close to the show as you can get and near-identical in gameplay to those on the Only Connect website. You have three minutes to find the groups and guess the connections with scoring just like the programme (except because this is a computer game everything is multiplied by 100). The main novelty comes in the mechanics of answering: rather than getting a single guess for each connection you can instead try out as many answers as you want until you hit on something the game accepts. While this may offend some purists it does mean much of the potential frustration caused by poor answer parsing (or merely fat fingers) is mitigated.

As long as the correct answer is in there somewhere you're fine.

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The challenge mode is an attempt to add a bit of variety, with missing vowels-style questions providing the opportunity to earn some extra time to solve a wall. Challenges are split into three rounds of four (unrelated) missing vowels clues all of which need to be solved within a fixed time limit. Each correct answer earns you five seconds of extra time (on top of a baseline two minutes) for that challenge's wall.

After each round you choose either to face the wall with the time you have or face some more clues to try and earn some extra seconds. Going for the wall early will earn you bonus points (200 after one round of missing vowels, 100 after two) but reduces how much extra time you could earn. Like the walls you can try as many guesses as you like for each missing vowels clue (which seems a little generous) as well as skip and come back to any that prove tricky.

"I don't know about you but I play 'muscle chairs' all the time."

Wall to wall walls

Overall the app is a perfectly fine way to add some connecting walls to your life but there's not much more to it than that. The challenge mode is a nice idea but doesn't really add too much to proceedings. Extra time on walls is seldom that useful and thus the 'dilemma' of scoring more points or playing more missing vowels isn't a particularly engaging one. Similarly the idea of trying to set high scores seems a little misplaced - you're only really interested in how you do on your first try.

Gameplay mechanics are fairly smooth, albeit with a touch of lag at the end of rounds. Answer parsing on walls, meanwhile, seems to err on the side of caution (I got away with 'TV' instead of 'TV sitcoms', for example), which is probably for the best, although good spelling remains crucial both to walls and missing vowels. American players may wish to take note of this second point; in an early game I tried 'theaters' to no avail.

With 108 walls you're looking at 1.4p per game (1.8p on Android), which isn''t too shabby, and it of course remains to be seen whether more content will be added as time goes on. As far as I can tell the walls are original but at least some of the missing vowels seem recycled from the show (not that this really affects gameplay much). While there are arguably better web-based options for both walls and missing vowels out there (not to mention the the official Only Connect site) this remains a good option for commutes and similar 'off-the-grid' occasions.

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