It’s always interesting to take a look back at the history of font. Why not do it in the form of a game? Well, that’s exactly what Type:Rider does.
In Type:Rider you play as a colon going through the history of the various fonts over the years. From ancient times to Times New Roman to Comic Sans, you’ll explore 10 different fonts and get a small taste of what it was like during the time which that font was popular. You’ll jump through (and collect) letters as you experience the various time periods.
At first, Type:Rider is actually a fairly good game. I think it was somewhere around the fourth level that I really started wanting to just rage quit. Throughout the game, the controls are a bit flaky but you can usually just work around them. Starting in the fourth level, however, those flaky controls really come back to bite you.
Type:Rider uses a system of hidden checkpoints. For a while the checkpoints are fairly nice – typically right before you failed your jump. They slowly start to be a lot less nice and start to force you to do larger chunks of levels if you die. For part of the fourth level, you are constantly being tracked (and shot at) by a sniper rifle. During this there’s a mine cart section. A mine cart where if you mistime your jump by even just a little you won’t be able to make your next jump and are stuck helpless. That is about the point where I really, really started to despise the controls.
The game also seems to really dislike being alt-tabbed out of. Funny, considering the game has no option for a windowed mode! If you alt-tab out of the game, well I hope you don’t value the music. It seems to just mysteriously vanish until you go into another area, something that can take a bit seeing as there’s only 4 “areas” in each level and 2 of those aren’t proper areas. I was really sad when I lost the music in one of the later levels as it actually had pretty good music to it!
While there is a lot of great backstory behind Type:Rider, well within a lot of reading if you are up to it, the game falls short on flaky controls and frustrating platforming in levels. I’d recommend the game ONLY if you are willing to deal with those flaky controls. Otherwise, there are vastly better platforming titles out there to check out.
Also, just to add insult to injury when you finish… Just do the Comic Sans level.
Type:Rider Review Score
2/5
Good premise and great back story, but flaky controls and absolutely frustrating platforming in places hurt it a lot.
