Typefighters Review - Keyboards are a Decent Weapon

When you think of competitive multiplayer games, usually you'll be thinking of jumping onto platforms and shooting at others, racing cars, or participating in wacky sports. Typefighters is a little unusual in that it's a competitive multiplayer typing game. Does this unique gameplay style shine, or should it have stuck to a different sort of competition?

While Typefighters is mostly made to be played multiplayer, the game can be played alone too. Here you'll be up against AI that just sort of throw words out at set intervals. You can adjust the speed of the AI, but it's not comparable to a real life opponent. It does serve as a decent way of practicing the game and testing out the various modes at least, but if you're not going to be playing Typefighters with friends, then I honestly wouldn't bother.

Typefighters has eight different game modes available to play, and most of them are quite different. As you would expect, some of these modes are better and more interesting than others. My favorite of the bunch is probably Creativity mode, where you earn points simply by typing whatever word comes to your mind. The longer the word, the more points. The catch is that no one can use the same word twice, and you need to pay attention to the words your opponent throws on the field or risk losing your multiplier by trying to play a word already played. Another great one is Guess, where you take turns typing out a word to shoot at your opponent. It then shoots your word and two randomly generated words at them, and your opponent can only clear them by figuring out and typing out your word before it reaches them. Both of these modes probably brought the most entertainment to my friends and I.

Some of the modes are a little more middle-ground. Lines is likely to be the one mode that could use improvement as all the potential for a great mode is there, and it just lacks in execution. The idea is that the game makes a 3x3 grid with 9 points that are marked by words, and you get a point if you connect several points into a line. Because it spawns several words at once, you can run into the problem where the game will put two words starting with the same letter. Say, "action" and "approach", for example. If I start typing "approach" the game will assume I'm trying to type "action" because it's alphabetically first, often leading me to lose my multiplier as the game thinks I want something different. Worse, there's no way to switch between words: "approach" is entirely unusable for either player until someone plays "action" first, no matter how much of a waste of time that could be. This is a bit of a shame, as Lines could easily have been one of the best modes in the game without this problem. Hopefully, a future patch can fix that one.

Some modes are just not that much fun. Stream, Tug, and Attention are just different variations on "who can type the word first", which only really works if both players have similar competitive typing speeds. There are some minor differences between them, like Attention has the word popping up anywhere and you need to pay attention to the whole screen while Tug is a tug of war, but it's not enough that the modes feel like anything more than type the word fast.

For the most part, that's all there really is to Typefighters when it comes to gameplay. Each of the game modes offers up something different, but not always something good. You can customize a lot of options, including the colors of basically everything in the game, score limits, time limits, how much words are worth, how fast and how high a multiplier can go, and several other aspects. You can also add your own dictionaries just in case a word you want isn't part of the official one (as an aside, "flapjacks" should totally be in the official dictionary.)

What you get out of Typefighters will mostly depend on what modes you play and who you play with. Alone it's just a boring game with some easy typing challenges against a crummy AI. Against a friend and with the right game modes you can have a good amount of fun. While it's not going to be my multiplayer game of choice, Typefighters is still worth a look.

Typefighters was played on Steam using a copy bought for the reviewer by a friend.