King’s got their formula down pat by now. First, take a puzzle concept that has shown some success in the past, be it Bejeweled, Peggle ($0.99), Puzzle Bobble, or anything else. If it’s not already stage-based, change it so that it is. Then dial up the difficulty gradually, spiking it now and then to tempt players towards buying power-ups. Introduce new levels regularly, new gimmicks almost as often, do the whole thing up in a sharp package, and wait for the money to come in. No one can deny the success they’ve had at it, to be sure. But apart from Candy Crush Saga (Free)’s follow-up Candy Crush Soda Saga (Free), King’s had trouble making their games stick of late. Their major successes, the two Candy Crush games, Farm Heroes Saga (Free), and Pet Rescue Saga (Free), continue to hang on the higher positions of the top grossing charts, but other efforts like Diamond Digger Saga (Free) and Paper Pear Saga (Free) have gone nowhere. My gut tells me there’s a pattern here, and that same instinct tells me that King’s latest, AlphaBetty Saga (Free), might suffer the same fate.

In case you can’t piece it together from one or two screenshots, AlphaBetty Saga is basically Bookworm/Boggle dressed up in Candy Crush‘s trappings. That means you’ll go stage by stage, trying to clear varying goals in a limited number of moves. Some of these are very familiar to King’s usual style, such as stages where you need to drop pieces of cheese from the top of the screen to the bottom, or ones that have you popping bubbles that cover the squares of the board. The difference here is that instead of switching pieces to make a match, you’re creating words out of the letters on the board. The words have to be at least three letters long, and every letter more than that you can muster will produce a different special piece. It doesn’t take long at all for stages to essentially require a steady flow of special pieces to finish, so you should get used to it quickly.

Around twenty or so levels in, the usual King obstacles start to appear. Tangled vines will obstruct blocks, requiring you to make a word on them to free them. Stone blocks need to be removed by making words using the letters adjacent to them. There are a couple of new blockers, but the feeling is very close to playing Candy Crush or Farm Heroes. In theory, the puzzle mechanic used this time around should give players a wider margin to show their skills instead of falling to luck of the draw with pieces. And it does, but the bad side effect of this mechanic is that it’s extremely clear when the game is setting you up to lose. There’s a discernible pattern to the letters that fall into the field in some rounds, and it can be very aggravating once you notice it.

The usual rules apply here, as well. You get a stock of lives that slowly replenishes over time. You can refill them instantly by using the game’s premium currency, gold, or you can wait a half-hour per life. That premium currency can also be used to buy special power-ups, some of which can occasionally make the difference between success and failure. It’s just as easy to waste them, unfortunately, and although the game gives you a small stock of each to try them out, the only one you can actually earn regularly in-game is one that allows you to shuffle the tiles around. Otherwise, you’re left to the mercy of your vocabulary skills and your luck when it comes to the letters the game throws at you.

AlphaBetty Saga has the usual King polish to it, of course. The art is professional-looking, the music sounds quite nice, and the game plays with sound effects and musical cues to get you into the game. I found the controls a little fussy when I had to link up tiles diagonally, but I was playing on an iPhone and I suffer from sausage fingers, so your mileage may vary there. I’m not even going to get into the game’s loosey-goosey dictionary, which seems to allow all sorts of non-English words and odd scraps of letters. That aside, there’s clearly been a lot of effort put into the game, as I would expect from this publisher’s previous works. At the same time, I can’t help but feel kind of bored with the game, and when I think enough about it, it’s likely the same thing that led me to ditch Papa Pear Saga pretty quickly.

I think that Candy Crush Saga succeeded because it presented a familiar gameplay mechanic in a fresh way. Instead of basing the game around an open-ended unlimited mode, it went for a stage-based approach, and it wasn’t afraid to bat you around. That particular kind of challenge was at the very least unusual at the time, and it gave the game a hook that made you not want to give up on it. In the case of AlphaBetty Saga, there are already plenty of word games on iOS that take a stage-based approach, and many of them are quite challenging. I feel like the only new thing this game is bringing to the word-game table is the limited life system. It will likely end up with considerably more levels than most other word games, but that doesn’t feel like enough to recommend the game over its many peers in this somewhat-crowded genre.

There’s no part of AlphaBetty Saga we haven’t seen done to death already. The King features are all well-worn by this point, the mouse theme certainly won’t win any awards for originality, and word games are a dime a dozen on the App Store. It’s not a terrible game on its own merits, and it’s certainly well-crafted in that particular King way, but I just can’t see myself sticking with this as long as I have with some of their other games. It’s so by-the-book that it ends up lacking any sort of excitement to call its own, and with heavy competition, that’s more than enough to sink a game.