A neat idea, just not done particularly well.
Basically all you have to do is type what comes up on the screen with either a USB keyboard or the chat pad that fits on the underside of the 360 controller. Obviously, unless you text message WAY too much on your phone or something you're going to want to use a USB keyboard, though.
It's a really neat game, and once I get a USB keyboard and I'm not stuck using the borrowed one I'm using now, I'll play it a bit more. But it's got some substantial problems that really suck the fun out of the game.
There's no real story to the game, you're just in a plane, and you have to keep the killer letters and words from hitting your cities by typing them out. Which is pretty much what you do in The Typing of the Dead, only instead of words you have to keep zombies from hitting you. Which, automatically makes it a lot more fun.
Graphically, the game is pretty damned good. It's pretty much an on rails shooter. The terrain looks great, even though it never changes. The letters are easily identifiable, and it uses a pretty generic font to make then easy to make out whether they're upper case or lower case. The explosions look great. The ship automatically zooms into the last few words or letters on the screen if they're far away. Even though it's all you'll ever see, it looks good. And the clouds in the sky, even though they look a little weird, have a nice close up view.
The sound is good. the shots sound great, the explosions sound great. There's a nice audio cue for when a bigger word comes up for bonus points. There's voiceover that tells you how you're doing and whatnot that's kind of Crazy Taxi-ish … which really doesn't fit the overall serious look of the game. But at least it's not terrible. The music though, I could take it or leave it. It's just generic sounding rock music. But overall it sounds pretty damn good.
The gameplay, in theory is good. There are 5 different levels. You type what you see on the screen before it hits a city. You get a certain amount of points for each correctly type word or letter, and it varies nicely in upper case and lower case, mixing in with words later on and numbers. And there's a lot of power in making a custom game where you can adjust the falling speed, max letters and words at a time, the letter and word difficulty, the chances of getting a superword, the number of rounds, the difficulty increase, objects per round and starting objects. And hit has four different slots to save your custom game in.
The real problem with the gameplay comes in in the difficulty and the camera angle though. After the first level, the difficulty REALLY ramps up. I'm a pretty fast typist, and after about the second level it was really giving me WAY too much stuff on the screen to effectively type out before they hit the cities or the ground. Now if you want to just move your way through the game and not worry so much about the score, you can just ignore the letters, numbers or words that are about to just hit the ground if something previously destroyed a city. The problem is, it's very hard to tell if something is going to hit either a city of a blank spot of rubble in front of it or behind it, which makes the game a lot more frustrating than it's worth.
4.5 – It's only 80 points, and if you're a typing game freak, definitely get it. And it's got some definite power in the way you can make a custom game. But the difficulty spike along with the lack of being able to tell where an object is about to hit on the ground makes it entirely too frustrating for it's own good and really sucks the fun out of it. Me personally, I'm going to stick to The Typing of the Dead. It's actually fun, and the difficulty increase is more gradual and doesn't try to rape you within a few minutes. Even on the hardest difficulty.