Review: Font Monsters - Save The World With Your Keyboard
by Allan Curtis
November 12, 2010
Overview
Font Monsters is an interesting game where you destroy monsters made up of symbols by typing their symbols on a keyboard.
Features
Font Monsters features unique typing based gameplay, stand out style graphics and 9 levels.
The good
Font Monsters is an enjoyable typing game in a genre that is rather uncommon on the iphone, the only other game being Texting of the Bread, although it is far less fun than that game.
In Font Monsters letter based aliens are invading Earth and its your job to stop them with your letter bullets. Yep.
The monsters are made of letters and symbols, for example a winged monster might have two elongated "O"s for wings "@"s for eyes and "#"s for its body. Your job is to type those symbols as quickly as possible on your keyboard to destroy that part of the monster. When you type every symbol, the monster is destroyed and the next appears.
If you take too long to type something the monster will start draining your energy and if you type a symbol that isn't part of the monster it will attack you back with a "font bullet", a red symbol that you must type to stop the bullet hitting you. If you run out of energy you must start the level over. There are 15 or more monsters a level and 5 levels
This is a neat idea, but its of no use whatsoever to teach you typing. The letters are in the wrong spots and the game's keyboard also features symbols such as "%" which are on an entirety different keyboard on the iphone. This means that all keys are in a different spot than they are on the standard keyboard and thus you wont learn much about typing quickly on the iphone with this game.
The game's monsters are really nicely deigned, featuring ghosts, weird birds, stars bizarre beaver looking monsters with two heads, odd looking penguin creatures and many more. Its amazing the things that can be made out of letters and symbols
Besides the letters Font Monster's graphics are merely functional. plain backgrounds and basic menu screens abound. The game as a whole has a distinctly retro Gameboy feel, with its monochrome sprites and static backgrounds.
The Bad
Font Monsters can get rather repetitive. The game's basic idea doesn't change and it isn't very fast paced or frantic like TotB is.
The sound is also poor, featuring a highly annoying and repetitive song that never changes, along with a rather annoying series of "bongs" as you type.
The Verdict
Font Monsters is a decent, imaginative game with a quirky charm to its letter graphics and is worth buying if you're after something different. If you want to actually learn typing and desire something a bit more fast paced and frantic, get Texting of the Bread.
