It's relatively rare that I bother writing a negative review, but this seems warranted due to the current, inexplicably high positive review rate, low price, and alarmingly high number of purchases I'm seeing on my FL. Basically, it seems worth warning people off from this.

I wanted to, erm, not hate this game, shall we say... but...

It really is quite terrible. Despite being a very fast typer, I have trouble mustering the typing energy to even elucidate why.

Perhaps that's because I am afraid of spending more effort writing a review than it takes to make a game as simplistic and terribly flawed as this.

In that sense, I speak as a programmer and a connoisseur of typing games.

So, I'll just quickly list out a bunch of the problems here:

There's (almost) nothing here for fast typers like myself. The game just doesn't scale. Doesn't show enough words on the screen at once (except the stream mode, which, due to its lateral movement, is too hard to visually follow; Lines mode is ok, and maybe projectiles mode in multiplayer, but that's about it).

The whole concept of multiplayer as executed here is fatally flawed. The only way this would ever be remotely fun is if the two players were almost exactly matched, and how likely is that? Not very, considering the huge range of typing ability that exists. The game tries to inject other elements besides just typing speed, but doesn't really succeed, imo. It's just awkward.

The "matchmaking" doesn't even exist as far as I can tell in the modern sense of the word. I think what the dev meant by this is... a server list. Yeah, a server list. But, even on launch day when steam stats say ~70 people are playing, I couldn't find any open games. It also supports direct IP, but then you'd have to fiddle with ports. From what I read on the forums, it sounds like you have to fiddle with ports to even get the non-direct "matchmaking" to work. There's no instructions on that, and maybe I'm wrong, but, whatever.

You can play against AI, but the AI just types words randomly at an EXACT speed. That kind of makes sense, but it's just not fun, especially since, at least for faster typers, their performance against AI especially will be down mostly due their ability to recognize words quickly after they appear (the AI starts typing immediately with no delay), and to not get tripped up by "weird" words that the game throws at you.

Similarly to "matchmaking", yes, the game has steam leaderboards, but they're, erm, silly, shall we say. Mostly they just track number of games won, which isn't well correlated with skill or anything. Then there's other stuff like a leaderboard for the highest difficulty AI opponent won, but that's just a multiplication of the two variables you can set for the AI, and there's pretty cheesy ways for even inexperienced typers to win against the hardest setting, so that, too, is awfully silly and pointless.

There's a variety of other more specific flaws like not being able to cancel out of typing a word you accidentally started - sometimes it's even hard to quickly figure out which word that is since you weren't already looking at it. The lines mode, one of the more interesting ones, has screwy graphics that make words hard to see quickly, which is again, a must for fast typers, if nothing else.

The word list is... bizarre. You are given a lot of very weird, obscure words, and lots of random proper nouns, and... roman numerals. It seems to randomly choose between categories of words, so a large proportion end up being proper nouns, and a surprisingly large percentage seem to be roman numerals... how did that ever seem to be a good idea?

There are, of course, no real graphics to speak of.

On the positive side, it's cool that the menus can also be operated via typing (though not entirely original), and the overall feel of the typing is slick and responsive. The general concept is interesting, but interesting ultimately doesn't matter if the execution is inadequate.

So, sure, this is kind of an original idea (at least, I'm not aware of another game that has this kind of direct, mano a mano typing gameplay), but who would this appeal to?

Well, I guess it just might be sort of fun for two friends that don't type very fast and happen to type at very similar rates - so I guess if you fall into that narrow category, then go for it, but otherwise steer clear.

Or, you can try it for less than 2 hours and see for yourself and then just grab a refund like I'm about to. EDIT: or, you can find the free version around elsewhere (I think it's the same except for the server list feature).

There plenty of better/good/decent alternatives for typing games out there. Even if you've played them all and are desperate for variety, this is unlikely to satisfy you in any way. For example, choose Epistory for a generally nice, well rounded typing game on Steam, or Typer Shark for a more simplistic yet challenging typing experience. For a real time competitive game, try Serpentine online (basically a Tangleword/boggle clone), or hi-games for pure, real time typing speed matchups.

This is a cute game, and a fun way to improve typing skills, but it's got some SERIOUS bugs!

Usually, once the timer runs out, you get a scorecard that says how well you did - your score, accuracy and so on. If you type too close to the end of the round, it'll just freeze at 0:00 and you'll have to hold escape to get to the menu. Once this is fixed, I would highly recommend this game for anyone looking to improve their typing!

I'm hoping to use it to learn the Dvorak keyboard.

Seriously? 20 seconds into the game, and it's dropping f-bombs. Glad my kids weren't playing it.

This game has very great potential and I love the way it's programmed. It has a very simple design, focusing only on the typing with no superfluous graphic distractions. The amount of modes is nice, and provides variety for those who want a simple game to play, and it also offers multiplayer options with people online. I personally play the Stream Mode, as it lets you know your WPM (since I purchased the game to help me type faster). HOWEVER. At the time of this review, I am VERY disappointed in the word choices: fake words, misspelled words, Roman numerals, acronyms, unnecessary apostrophes, proper nouns that aren't capitalized, and way too many words about reproductive organs. I'm not sure if users are the ones who contribute to the word lists, but since you have to be online to play this game anyway, I think it would be better if the game just pulled words from an online dictionary instead.

Super basic typing game. There are a lot better options out there.

Too barebones too be engaging.

There is a lot of potential here, and I feel that it's not far from being one of the best typing games available.

With just a few changes, I think I'd recommend this game:

• Allow custom dictionaries to be added by players via some method like the Steam Workshop (American English seems to contain words that aren't even in some dictionaries?)
  
• Add a 'debris' gamemode, where a large field of words is placed onto the screen (important: words NOT MOVING) and players get points for clearing the words off the screen.
  
• If I am in the middle of typing a word and the other player beats me, I don't want my momentum from continuing to type that word select a new one that I didn't intend to. Allow some kind of configurable timeout to occur, or just multi-match for the some 0.4 seconds after getting beaten to allow the player's hands to stop moving.
  
• Many of the gamemodes with moving words or random positioning are more disorienting than they should be, and are less about the typing as they are re-focusing on the newly spawned text in order to read it.

With those few changes, I feel my review will then be a positive one.

There are some additional features I would wish to see from a more completed game though:

• An accuracy/endurance mode: less about "quick draw" mechanics and more about finishing complete sentences or paragraphs. (With or without punctuation as an option.)
  
• More than two players in some gamemodes: there's a lot of potential for something like 8 player asteroids mode or similar ideas
  
• Multi-word and symbol options: allow custom dictionaries to include full lines of text, so that people could train on terminal commands, common sentences, or text involving numbers and symbols like LaTeX or mathematica languages.

I bought this game as part of a bundle with the much more realised EpiStory (which has some great graphics to boot). The multiplayer is completely dead, but it could be a bit of fun with friends. However, this game has some huuuuuuge balancing problems.

There are a few game modes where typing speed isn't sooo important, but if one player can type at 100wpm and one player types at a max of 55wpm, there's no question who is going to win - even if the 55wpm player is, say, better at coming up with words in 'Creativity' mode or has faster instincts. There is one mode where typing speed isn't a significant factor but can still decide matches - Reflection. It's variant, Tug, is still largely decided by typing speed. I just don't see any way this can be much fun with the lack of balance.

Competition against the AI falls into two categories: way too slow, or impossibly quick, to the point where it is impossible to do things earlier than the AI. It isn't all that much fun even when the AI does match you because the match feels empty.

Typeracer is, unfortunately, way more fun.

I played it for about an hour and I don't think I'll ever touch it again. It definitely isn't worth the $2, and I'll go into exactly why with some more brutal comments as this review draws to an end.

TypeFighters is a poor realisation of a great - but largely impractical - idea. A game that uses typing as its main game mechanic? That's so cool! Typeracer is great and all, but it's not that much fun when the only game element is competing for the top 20 scores of the hour. It's just a singleplayer typing test where the results are compared against other people, and the closest it comes is to 5 people doing the same typing test at the same time. That's *almost* like competitive gameplay, but it's still way too separate. Typeracer is an ego trip - I've wanted a multiplayer typing game where there is both skill and speed involved for a long time. TypeFighters is the exact kind of game I wanted to love, but it's just gets boring too fast.

There are a bunch of modes, but once you've played them a few times, you've played them to death. There's some definite creativity here - I particularly like Tug & Reflection. If only they worked practically. Much like TypeRacer, the competition is still too separate because of the disparate typing speeds between players. It's just too imbalanced for it to be any fun, and there's no depth in the singleplayer to make it worth buying.

This game is very barren.

The screen is jerky when I type and it give me motion sickness. Very hard to play/read with the words jumping around like that.

The game is ok, but the multiplayer has its bugs with the score not showing to the joined player and requires you to leave or host to end the multiplayer game in order to go back to the main menu.