What if you kept the B-movie plot and mutants from The House of the Dead: Overkill, but replaced the guns with a keyboard and bullets with random words? It sounds pretty bizarre but you’ll end up with the unique experience which is Modern Dream’s The Typing of the Dead: Overkill.
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After the release of Headstrong Games’ The House of the Dead: Overkill in February 2009, The Typing of the Dead: Overkill (referred to within this review as TTOTDO) was developed by Modern Dream before being both announced and released on the same day of October last year. Creation began at Blitz Games Studios and upon the company’s liquidation in September 2013, the development team were able to convince Sega to let them complete the title under a new license.
I played the Windows version of the original The Typing of the Dead an extremely long time ago and remember it fondly, so when I found that Modern Dream’s sequel was being included in a Humble Bundle I jumped at the chance to snap it up. I’m a self-taught typist and do pretty well when it comes to speed, but I’ve never learnt to type formally and sometimes look at the keyboard. I’ve picked up plenty of bad habits over the years – but TTOTDO might actually get me to break some of them.
The game follows the same storyline of The House of the Dead: Overkill and is set in 1991. Years ago during the cold war, the military made a new superhuman formula called Formula X; but the project for its use failed and the bunker for the experiments has been left closed – until now. Special Agent G is sent to a small town in Louisiana to investigate a series of disappearances and hunt down deranged crime lord Papa Cesar. Due to the infestation of mutants, he is forced to team up with Detective Isaac Washington who is out to get revenge for the murder of his father.
TTOTDO’s gameplay is extremely simple and straight-forward. Your point-of-view moves through the world automatically so you don’t have to worry about navigation. All you need to take care of are the relentless zombie hordes rushing towards you, by typing every world that floats into view in order to kill them. Don’t worry about capitalisation, spaces or punctuation – just type correctly as fast as you can to unleash a hail of bullets on the mutants and drive them backwards.
Just type, goddammit!
Misspelling a word results in it staying visible on the screen and highlighted at the last correct letter; and unless you catch up quickly, you’ll find a mutant lashing out at you and taking away some of your health. Single letters appear as hurled weapons and it’s necessary to take them out fast or they’ll end up dealing you damage. If you see anything glowing in the environment around you, hitting the tab key will earn you a power-up or collectable souvenir such as comic book pages, fake movie posters or concept art.
There are nine chapters in total and at the end of each you’ll encounter a boss fight. They aren’t much different from the regular zombies – sure, they’re bigger and badder and meaner, but that’s pretty much it. They appear, you wait until the words pop up, type furiously until they’re pushed back and spawn some smaller zombies or other creatures, and you type some more; rinse and repeat until their death. There was one boss who I found a little difficult because I just couldn’t seem to type fast enough, but keep at it and you’ll get through them.
This boss caused me a bit of bother, but she eventually succumbed to my WPM.
That being said however, the final boss is different from the others; it confused me first of all as there are no given words to type. After hours of staring at the screen and waiting for them to appear, it takes a while to get your brain into gear and come up with words that are associated with the topic you’re given instead. For example, you may be told you type about ‘Varla Guns’ so you could come back with something like ‘stripper’ or ‘motorbike’. It’s a nice change of pace but there’s just one issue with this section of the game: you can hammer random keys and they all count as a hit. Thank god for dsjndajksbndjksa!
The storyline is presented cinematically, with a psychedelic intermission screen displaying when data is being loaded. Each chapter starts with a cheesy movie-trailer-style voiceover overlaid with film scratches, and the visuals perfectly capture the cheap and sleazy grindhouse spirit. At the start of TTOTDO you’ll watch your screen intensely as you try to take in what’s going on during the cutscenes, but after a while they can become a bit long-winded. It’s possible to skip through them but then you wouldn’t understand what’s going on in the plot – not that the plot makes much sense anyway!
The visuals suit the sleazy grindhouse style perfectly.
An interesting fact about The House of the Dead: Overkill is that it holds the Guinness World Record for the most number of ‘f***s’ in its script. That’s 189 in total so if you have personal or parental issues with profanity, you might want to steer clear of TTOTDO. You can of course turn off the sound and disable the subtitles, but you’d remove half the fun of the game if you take away the cheesy story elements – and you’d miss the fabulously-kitsch 70s style soundtrack.
Although the gameplay may seem rather limited, it’s highly-addictive and you’ll find yourself coming back for more. As mentioned above, there are nine chapters in total and there are three bewilderingly-named difficulty levels: Bitch (easy), Agent (medium) and Motherf***er (hard). Once you’ve worked your way through all of these you can unlock a Hardcore mode, and there are a number of DLC packs available such as ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Silver Screen’ to keep you going.
More FPS than any other video game.
As I said in my recent guilty pleasures post, I really shouldn’t like TTOTDO. It features Varla Guns (described as ‘the hottest stripper on the Bayou City club scene’) and Candi Stryper (portrayed as the ‘dumb blonde’ stereotype) as two of its protagonists. You’ll come up against bosses such as mutant strippers Coco and Sindy. There are plenty of gratuitous boob shots. And you’ll hear lines such as: “I’ve never felt so turned on in my life! Don’t worry Detective. Everybody will have their chance to have a go.”
But I love it because it’s just so damn camp. Yes it’s sexist, yes it’s profane, yes it’s cheesy – but you can’t take it seriously and I can’t stop laughing at the scantily-clad mutants and F-bombs. Take this as an example: you’re fighting a boss called Meat Katie, a grotesquely-mutated butcher woman with a cow skull and udder attached to her body who uses a giant meat cleaver in battle. You’re confronted with words such as ‘Udderly delightful’ and ‘Sirloin surprise’ until she’s forced backwards into a meat grinder and dies with a moo. How can you not laugh at that?
Meat Katie is enough to give any player a sirloin surprise.
Although the game includes the Extended Cut version of The House of the Dead: Overkill, it’s a bit overpriced at $19.99. In addition, it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea – a stripper-loving, zombie-killing, f-word-dropping cup of tea. But I urge you to give it a go if you can get hold of it at a discounted price: it may be stupid and dumb, but it’s so much fun.
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