Recent reviews by talbot

This game is really fun, but there isn't a lot of content (as of 5/18/22). I played it for three hours, have done a handful of runs, and beaten it twice. I'm SO excited for the full release of this game, as I think the concept and execution are really on point, but $20 feels a bit steep for how little there is to do. If money isn't a big concern, give it a shot, but if spending is tight, try the demo and wait for the full release.

Let's make this very clear: this game is not good. Here's the tl;dr - while typing games are inherently fun, all the things within this specific typing game are ok at best and really distracting/detrimental to an enjoyable time at worst.

I bought this game after a long while of wanting to play the original Typing of the Dead (which isn't on steam). There's a lot of charm in that game, in the terrible voice acting, the fun boss gimmicks, the huge dictionary. I watched some gameplay on youtube of this game before buying it, and while it looked like a less polished game than I was hoping for for the price tag, I was hoping it would grow on me, but it hasn't. I have beaten the game in its entirety on normal difficulty and have played through most of it on the hardest difficulty with hardcore mode on. I do not think this is a good game. It has a few key features that made me not refund it, and those are it's only selling points. Let's start with those.

The BEST things about this game are the community made dictionaries and the capacity for multiplayer in a typing game. The community dictionaries are fantastic. There's a lot of personality and a ton of words/phrases in most of the popular ones so you rarely see repeats. You're often chuckling along with funny ones or being challenged by difficult ones. Some downsides to the community ones are that they don't appear to me to adjust difficulty very well to whatever you've selected or the dynamic difficulty present in the base dictionary. Overall definitely worth looking into if you do purchase this game, to the point where I wouldn't spend the money on the DLC if I could go back in time and stop myself. On the topic of multiplayer, I haven't actually played it, which is pretty brutal that I feel it's still one of the strongest parts of this game. The biggest reason I didn't refund this game is because I have a buddy who just built a nice mechanical keyboard and wanted to play a typing game with me. We haven't yet, but it's an aspect of this game that is quite unique to my knowledge. I don't have a lot of other options there, so I'll end up sticking with this.

The music is terrible. If someone told me the entire soundtrack was bought off a library somewhere, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. It almost never matches the mood; sounds incredibly generic; and the sound mixing makes the transitions in and out of tracks abrupt, distracting, and lowers the production value of the game. It will make for a better experience to turn if off entirely and put on something yourself in another tab or something. The sound effects also don't trigger predictably or consistently, either. Sometimes you'll hear a very loud squelching sound when you kill a zombie, and other times you will hear nothing at all. It leads to a feeling that what you're typing doesn't make a ton of difference as to how the world responds. Just turn it off.

The story is abysmal. This may sound like a cheap criticism given that we're talking about a typing game. However, given that every level force you into a loading screen, makes you watch a (thankfully skipable) cutscene, puts you in another load screne, and only THEN lets you play the level, I think this is fair. That loading screen/cutscene/loading screen loop is also repeated every level before the boss. The final boss (spoilers btw) gimmick is that it makes you do open ended word association about various characters and events in the story, as well. Therefore, it expects you to not only watch all of the story, but internalize and relate to it to some extent. Which is very hard given that this story is straight garbage. The events of the story are cliche'd and surface level, and the characters are completely simultaneously one dimensional and also never shut the ♥♥♥♥ up. They constantly chatter mid stage, and the dialogue is never interesting, funny, or build the world in any meaningful way. Each character has one gimmick. The detective curses nonstop, the agent's name is G, one girl is dressed "sexy", and the other is stupid. That's it, you now understand everything there is to know about the characters. The villains are one dimmensionally evil. None of this would be a criticism at all if the game didn't require you to know the events and characters of the story in order to beat the final boss. The only time I saw a lose screen at all on my first run of the game was in that fight because about halfway through the game I began to skip every cutscene. It just wasn't worth it to watch them. They're that bad.

The voice acting is bad. It's so bad it's not funny, it's not charming. It's just distracting to the experience. The writing is bad already, so it's wild that often times I was distracted by how the lines are delivered more than the actual story. The game is best experienced with the voice acting turned all the way off. There are toggleable subtitles, so if you really want to, you can still know what the characters say.

The dictionary is also small, or at least it felt like it. I was getting repeat words/phrases about halfway through the game. The words and phrases themselves are decent, and the dynamic difficulty on normal/hard thankfully keep the typing itself from getting boring. It's just a bit sad that you end up getting repeats in the base game. This is why the community dictionaries are so important.

There are a handful of common bugs/technical difficulties. As you will see through a lot of reviews, there's a solid chance anyone who downloads the game is going to have to do some configuring just to get the game to run. I mean, this is steam, so that happens with what feels like every other game, so I won't take off big points for that. I didn't have to do any of that, thankfully, but as a consumer you should be aware of it. The bug I have run into semi-consistently is one where you type a word to kill a zombie, the word box disappears just like you killed it, except it doesn't die. It just walks up to you and kills you, one slow hit at a time. I haven't found a way around this, and if this happens to you it is a slow lose screen. So either you hit ESC, quit the level and restart from the beginning, or you let the zombie kill you, lose a chunk of points, and continue on from there. Given that there is a scoring system in this game, that will annoy you directly proportionately to how much you care about your grade at the end of the level. This has happened to me about once an hour in my game. So keep an eye out for that if you do buy it.

The actual gameplay is a mixed bag. Like I said at the top, I love typing games. I think they are a genre that is harder to get wrong than get right. I will say this game is very easy. Unless you are on hardcore mode, you do not have to type anything that is not a letter (or a number if you're doing certain community dictionaries). No space bar, no periods, no commas, no apostrophes, no dashes. For people newer to typing, this is actually a pretty great thing I think. It addresses certain accessibility concerns people might have with beginner typists. However, if you are not a beginner typist, there's nothing you can do to change it until you beat the story and unlock Hardcore mode. Hitting space isn't hardcore. It's a basic of typing. I really believe either A) difficulties above beginner should use the whole keyboard, or B) hardcore mode is available from the start. I would never have played the game without it, had I been given the choice. The highest difficulty also disables the ability to backspace to change your target, which increases the difficulty in the wrong area. It's often unclear just who the zombie is that's going to attack you first when a group shows up, and if you guess wrong or wait you are usually going to take damage. It feels lucky when you don't.

This game is also ugly as hell. I guess it's a port of a wii game though, so eh.