As anyone who has edited me over the years knows, I’m not a great typist. Or, ironically, as I originally spelled it, typepost. Every time I press a key, an extra character comes in, all the letters in the word get jumbled up, and the most common sin I commit is skipping entire words entirely in my rush to get to the end of a sentence.
So, with some trepidation, I installed the Typing Break demo. In this game, the only thing standing between you and the hordes of enemies descending from the screen is your ability to type words like “pistol” and “machine gun” quickly and accurately.
On the surface, Typing Break is simply a word game version of Space Invaders. Enemies move to the bottom of the screen and damage your health when they reach the bottom. You fight incoming enemies by typing the name of a weapon into your little tank and firing that weapon into the incoming waves. However, what complicates matters are the affixes that can be unlocked. Entering these words in addition to the weapon name will change how the gun behaves when fired. For example, Fury increases your rate of fire. So when you type “Fury pistol,” the character at the bottom of the screen spits out bullets like an automatic tennis ball machine trying to get the job done quickly.
Image credits: Rock Paper Shotgun / Gamirror Games / Thorus Games
Each time you defeat a wave, you are given the opportunity to upgrade one of your weapons, add a passive ability, or unlock a new weapon or affix. You may want something with a slightly faster rate of fire, such as a machine gun, or something a little heavier, such as a grenade launcher. New affixes include Lightning, which chains attacks together, Frost, which slows down enemies, and Fire, which sets enemies ablaze.
You might try typing “Lightning” quickly…
What makes typing breaks interesting is that you’re not limited to just one affix. So if you have it unlocked, you can type Fury Frost Grenade Launcher to fire a volley of slow-triggering explosives to force an advance on your enemies. Of course, the longer the command string, the more likely it is that an error will occur. Also, if you make a typo, the entire string will be deleted and you’ll have to start over.
We recommend jumping into the demo and seeing what combinations you can come up with. I’ll admit that the biggest success I had was sticking with the Fury affix and investing all my upgrades into passive improvements to the starting pistol, increasing ammo capacity and critical hit chance. You’d think that an RPS editor would be able to type the word Shotgun quickly and without making any mistakes, but as I’ve said before, my input is pretty shocking.
