DISCLAIMER: I'm a retired medical transcriptionist who types 90 WPM, so my impression of this game is likely quite different from gamers who are not professional typists.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Typer Shark! Deluxe impressed me. For an introductory typing game, it does what it does quite well. I don't doubt that the makers were trying to make a game that can genuinely improve a beginner's typing skill. And I think they succeeded!
There are three modes; Adventure, Abyss, and Tutorial.
The Adventure mode does solidly well at single-letter and short-word gameplay. Its pace of play is brisk enough that gamers likely won't be bored, but no so brisk that they'll feel overwhelmed. That's a delicate needle to thread, but this game does it! The only negative I have about Adventure mode are the sharks where the word changes when the gamer is in the middle of typing them. That has no real-world typing usefulness, so it feels like it was put into the game simply to add another challenging wrinkle. Understandable if so, but I think it'd've been far better if the challenging wrinkle was something more real-world useful, like longer words or the inclusion of special characters.
The Abyss mode's gameplay is exactly similar to Adventure mode, except the difficulty increases non-stop to test the gamer's typing speed, and eventually the gamer will get chomped (or stung). This didn't displease me at all, because the difficulty increases at a slow-enough pace that novice typists will likely feel a palpable sense of improvement upon repeated plays.
The Tutorial level shines! Finger drills in single letters, punctuation, special characters, short-word sentences, and long-word sentences (including a page from Edgar Poe).....these are the kind of exercises I was doing during medical transcription school in 2000. It also keeps track of speed and accuracy so the gamer/student can do these exercises repeatedly and see the improvement they make, and hopefully feel that improvement.
And throughout all three Modes, I ROYALLY appreciated the very pleasant dearth of downtime between levels. No cutscenes at all. One level ends, and the next begins whenever the gamer is ready!
CONCLUSION: Typer Shark! Deluxe is a solidly good beginner's typing game. The fun gameplay and genuinely useful tutorial make this a game that one can learn from and have fun in the process. Very well done, PopCap Games!!
