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.
