Type Hard is a free indie game that's actually pretty interesting, considering its only gameplay mechanic is typing. Words appear on screen and you type them. You earn points for not making mistakes, and for typing more words per minute. That's it. It's an extremely simple concept that shouldn't really be that interesting, but by golly does it get the adrenaline pumping. It's very similar to The Typing of the Dead, if you're at all familiar with that title.
Here's the trailer for Type Hard, which illustrates the gameplay and some of its features.
The gameplay revolves around typing consecutive words without making mistakes. When you mess up, a meter in the bottom right corner slowly fills up. If you take too long to type the words out, and the screen gets cluttered with words, the meter fills up. Once it reaches maximum, that's game over. Typing words in successfully lowers the meter. The rate at which words are presented also accelerates as you go on. After surviving three rounds of typing, you fight a "boss" that tosses words and random combinations of letters at you, while you block them and attack back with more words.
It may sound kind of boring, but the gameplay is actually pretty tense. Fast, thumping techno music plays very prominently, and a bunch of blaring sirens flash all over the screen as words appear. As you make mistakes, the crowd will start to murmur and cause a ruckus, very similar to Guitar Hero, which makes an already tense situation even more so. Once that bar gets high, you have to type faster to get it down which also means you're more likely to make mistakes. Very nerve-wracking.
Combined with everything else, it makes the game extremely engaging. The scoring system gives you feedback and, at least in my case, gave me incentive to keep retrying in order to improve. After playing for about 15 minutes, I could feel my heart beating faster and my hands sort of trembling from the sheer adrenaline this game was able to conjure in me. Not a lot of games manage to do that, and it's even more impressive that such a simple game is able to.
But with that said, the game can be unnecessarily frustrating. Some of the words are spelled with their British-English versions (e.g. aluminium, colour, speciality, realise, complexion), and this trips me (an American) up a lot because when I read the word, my brain doesn't acknowledge that particular spelling at first. The font doesn't help, either, because when things get frantic a lot of letters start to look alike (FPR, HXMNW, TI, VUY, QOCDG). It becomes especially difficult to read when the bosses throw out random letter combinations like HVQF that bounce around the screen.
There are three different difficulties, as well as an endless mode that functions kind of like a survival mode where you just keep typing words until you inevitably fail. With everything said, there's not a lot of actual content but I found it rather compelling. It doesn't cost anything to play, and doesn't demand more than a few minutes of your time to figure out if it's something you'd like or not. I think it's worth checking out just because of its unique premise. If you're interested in playing, you can download (and view the leaderboards) here [http://typehard.haxor.fi/].
I originally wrote about Type Hard for my blog [http://thenocturnalrambler.blogspot.com/2011/08/type-harder-not-smarter.html], but I thought the game was so enjoyable that I wanted to share it with more people.
Here's the trailer for Type Hard, which illustrates the gameplay and some of its features.
The gameplay revolves around typing consecutive words without making mistakes. When you mess up, a meter in the bottom right corner slowly fills up. If you take too long to type the words out, and the screen gets cluttered with words, the meter fills up. Once it reaches maximum, that's game over. Typing words in successfully lowers the meter. The rate at which words are presented also accelerates as you go on. After surviving three rounds of typing, you fight a "boss" that tosses words and random combinations of letters at you, while you block them and attack back with more words.
It may sound kind of boring, but the gameplay is actually pretty tense. Fast, thumping techno music plays very prominently, and a bunch of blaring sirens flash all over the screen as words appear. As you make mistakes, the crowd will start to murmur and cause a ruckus, very similar to Guitar Hero, which makes an already tense situation even more so. Once that bar gets high, you have to type faster to get it down which also means you're more likely to make mistakes. Very nerve-wracking.
Combined with everything else, it makes the game extremely engaging. The scoring system gives you feedback and, at least in my case, gave me incentive to keep retrying in order to improve. After playing for about 15 minutes, I could feel my heart beating faster and my hands sort of trembling from the sheer adrenaline this game was able to conjure in me. Not a lot of games manage to do that, and it's even more impressive that such a simple game is able to.
But with that said, the game can be unnecessarily frustrating. Some of the words are spelled with their British-English versions (e.g. aluminium, colour, speciality, realise, complexion), and this trips me (an American) up a lot because when I read the word, my brain doesn't acknowledge that particular spelling at first. The font doesn't help, either, because when things get frantic a lot of letters start to look alike (FPR, HXMNW, TI, VUY, QOCDG). It becomes especially difficult to read when the bosses throw out random letter combinations like HVQF that bounce around the screen.
There are three different difficulties, as well as an endless mode that functions kind of like a survival mode where you just keep typing words until you inevitably fail. With everything said, there's not a lot of actual content but I found it rather compelling. It doesn't cost anything to play, and doesn't demand more than a few minutes of your time to figure out if it's something you'd like or not. I think it's worth checking out just because of its unique premise. If you're interested in playing, you can download (and view the leaderboards) here [http://typehard.haxor.fi/].
I originally wrote about Type Hard for my blog [http://thenocturnalrambler.blogspot.com/2011/08/type-harder-not-smarter.html], but I thought the game was so enjoyable that I wanted to share it with more people.
