Typomagical is a typing spell-building bullet heaven that will make you panic
Blending the very different worlds of typing games with survivor-like bullet heavens, Typomagical will make you sweat as you frantically type spells. Your fingers will end up quite afraid of you loading this one up. Disclosure: the developer sent a key to GamingOnLinux.
For anyone who has played a bullet heaven, you will know half of what to expect here. You run around killing various types of enemies, collect their gems to level up and then pick an upgrade in the form of character buffs and new types of spells to cast. What's different here is that you're not auto-firing or using twin-sticks to aim and fire. Instead, you physically type out the commands to launch spells.
It's clever and slow to start, but once you get going it becomes pure total chaos as you manically type out whatever spell combinations you can remember to take down as many enemies as you can before they take you down. Spelling everything wrong in the process as you begin to sweat - it's quite amusing actually.
Some enemies will drop coins as well, which you can use for permanent meta upgrades like more health, faster movement, a better dodge ability and to add in new spells and mods to the pool of selections for each future run. So there's more to work towards as you play.
An impressive amount of different types of spells to cast too, some of them just get totally ridiculous too. The developer said there's over "30,000 possible combinations" and i can certainly believe that due to the way you chain things together. You get initial spells for example like "ball" which you combine with elements and mods that end up like "heavydoublefireball" that has you shoot two fire balls that are heavy so they push enemies back. They get longer, and funnier too.
I love the chain reaction synergies between some of the spells too. Like electrocuting enemies, then hitting them with a fireball to watch a few of them explode together. Plenty of little things like that to discover as you cast spell after spell.
The result is a game that's fun, unique and quite unsurprisingly difficult. It depends on many things: your memory, your fast fingers with accurate typing and character movement on top of that to keep you away from enemies. Never a dull moment in Typomagical.
Survive hordes of quirky enemies for 15 minutes.
Combine and type words to cast dynamic spells on the fly.
Experiment with builds: over 30,000 possible word combinations.
Purchase spells and upgrades with coins earned.
I wasn't entirely sure if I was going to review this to be honest with you. I finally hit the wall where I've started to feel a little burned out with the bullet heaven genre because I've ended up playing so many (there's even a Snake version of it now). But, this typing spell-making combination was enough to sucker me back in.
Seeing the high scores some people were able to hit made me want to push further into it too. I don't often get competitive for leaderboards, but I felt the need to show off my typing muscles here. The only thing it has actually shown is that I panic far too much, and spell everything terribly when under pressure so we won't talk about my current score.
Tested on Fedora KDE 44, no problems at all with the Native Linux version. Wonderful to see yet another game made with the open source Godot Engine. Seeing more indie developers pick it up and actually release something makes me happy.
A rather good and very chaotic choice if you like typing games.