TYPECAST Review

TYPECAST is an arcade title that mixes the ever-famous bullet hell genre with typing, creating an exciting new shooting experience.

Truth be told, with TYPECAST, you get exactly what you learn about and what you see, and that isn't a bad thing — it's a hectic current-gen arcade title. As the Steam description explains, there are no roguelike/lite elements and no progression; you launch a run, play, and finish your run in mere minutes. What you get is an arcade title that is true-to-classic, incorporating bullet-hell elements with a unique twist of typing.

The gameplay is quite simple. You move your character around with precise mouse movements and fight back against endless hordes of foes, each of which has a letter in their body that you need to press in order to kill them. You'll be using Q, W, E, R, A, S, D, F, G, H, Z, X, C, and L, though you really use all of the keyboard.

The game starts simple to build a fake confidence in all of the unsuspecting players (like me, who is a prominent typer, knows the keyboard by memory, and types at 100+ WPM on average). As I have loved all the typing titles I've played before and found little challenge from them, I thought TYPECAST was going to be similarly simple.

Oh, I was wrong. So wrong.

Plainly put, TYPECAST makes you think that you are a good typer but punishes you extremely hard for not using the Homerow method of typing — which I do not do (sue me!). Events occur throughout your (sometimes laughably short) run that bring new enemies into the play, and each new one can have a unique key that you have to press in order to defeat them. More challenging enemies require more complex key presses, meaning that you'll need to move your hand out of your comfort zone to be able to reach it (in my case, G and H).

There are various skills you can use throughout your run, including a slow-motion you can trigger with your right mouse button, an explosion with your left mouse button, and a parry that you can do by clicking the wrong key, making you invulnerable momentarily. With a combination of these, your single goal will be to reach ever-higher scores to get on the leaderboards and beat your previous records and friends.

To do this, you will be able to alter various aspects of the game, none of which gate you from being able to partake in the online rankings. You can adjust your difficulty by changing the Difficulty Settings, giving you access to the following modifications:

• HP
• Slow-mo Amount
• Bomb Count
• Attack Range
• Enemy Spawn Rate

Depending on what you change and whether you make it harder or easier, you'll get a score multiplier equivalent to what kind of difficulty you set. This, in turn, makes it harder or easier to do runs, but thus, changes how much score you get. But this is more of a skill-based title, meaning that the skill ceiling is limitless, and theoretically, you could reach hundreds of millions of points if you're good enough.

That's the charm of the game — you pick it up, play a round, or two, or ten, and you see your score get better in the leaderboards as you raise your skill and ranking, adjust your difficulty settings, and play more rounds. Theoretically, it is an endless title that could be enjoyed for years and become competitive. However, the skill ceiling might be too high for those who are uncomfortable with the keyboard or do not know their way around the keys.