Keys of Fury: Typing Action

Are you a fan of old school beat ‘em ups like Final Fight and Streets of Rage? Do you enjoy the act of typing on a keyboard? If you answered yes to those two questions, then you might enjoy the new game Keys of Fury: Typing Action, a game that mixes the brawler genre with a high school typing class. Now, what if I told you that the game was incomplete? And I don’t mean that in the “Early Access” kind of way, but rather that the story is only three levels long with the rest “coming soon.” How do you feel about that? Wait ... where are you going? Don’t leave just yet, because I still need to review Keys of Fury: Typing Action by Pacific Northwest-based developer, Elecorn.

As somebody who writes for a living, I am the type of gamer who can’t get enough of typing games. I love them, and I enjoy seeing the wildly different takes developers have on the genre. I’m also a huge fan of classic beat ‘em ups. So, when I heard that there was a developer combining these two things I love, I figured that it couldn’t miss. Is it even possible to screw up a brawler with typing controls? Unfortunately, as you’ll discover from this review, the answer is actually “yes.”

Keys of Fury tells the story of Tai Ping who, after getting jumped by a bunch of over-zealous robots, gets recruited by the city mayor and asked to run a bunch of odd jobs in exchange for safe travel to her destination. And by odd job what they mean is that they want Tai to use her superior fighting ability to clean up the streets and take on a nefarious vegetable seller who specializes in some real questionable business tactics.

We fight these bad guys by typing out words and phrases. Obviously. This is a typing game, after all. At first it’s all about completing typing those words before the enemies attack, but the game quickly mixes things up by making you type out a disappearing and reappearing phrase or typing out a bunch of words at once before you can do real damage. The premise may be simple enough, but the developer has done a good job of keeping things fresh by changing how the words are displayed or how you interact with them.

That is, without a doubt, the best thing about Keys of Fury. For the first fifteen or twenty minutes, I had a lot of fun. While I’m not the biggest fan of the art style, I do like the frenetic energy and the beat ‘em up action. I could tell right away that this was going to be an easy game to recommend, especially to people who love these types of typing games. But then I finished stage three and everything went downhill.

You see, the issue I keep tip-toeing around is the simple fact that this game is incomplete. If you buy Keys of Fury right now, at full price, you will only get the first three stages of the story. That’s right, three short, bite-sized stages. That’s it. It tells us that more stages will come in February, but who knows if that will happen or if it will be the rest of the game or just a few more stages, yet again leaving the game incomplete.

It would be one thing if developer Elecorn had launched the game into Early Access or even sold it as an episodic experience. I mean, there still wouldn’t be a lot of content, but at least players would have a better idea of what to expect. As it currently stands, the way Keys of Fury is being sold feels dishonest. It comes across as a developer trying to trick people into thinking that they are getting a full game, only to pull the rug and reveal that the rest of the game will be coming at a future date.

And you want to know what’s even worse? This isn’t the first time Elecorn has pulled this bait and switch trick. Back in 2009, the exact same developer released Caster, a game that promised one thing, but delivered something else. Based on user reviews from as recent as this past July, the main criticism was that people were given two short levels and then got a “to be continued” message. That was sixteen years ago, and Caster is still incomplete?

That said, I am a bit more optimistic when it comes to Keys of Fury. The fact that the “coming soon” sign has a date gives me some hope that at least a few more levels are on the way. Will we then have to wait another few months for more stages? I don’t know, but that’s the kind of thing that probably should be addressed on the sale page. As far as I can tell, most people are open to supporting half-finished games if the developer is honest about it and keeps everybody in the loop. It’s that simple.

While it’s extremely easy to harp on the game for being incomplete, it is worth mentioning that Keys of Fury comes with a handful of mini-games that help to soften the blow a little bit. The nine different “arcade” games included all seem to neatly fall into one of two categories – trying to race the dinosaurs and events where you square off against wave after wave of bad guys. There’s a mini-game where you do this in a classic arcade, as well as one where you’re typing out corny jokes.

If I’m being generous, I would say there’s about an hour’s worth of content in Keys of Fury. That will increase as more stages get added, but for right now, you can see and do everything this game has to offer in about sixty minutes. The good news is that it’s not an expensive game. At a mere five dollars, you may feel like it’s worth it for an hour of gameplay and the promise of more to come. It’s certainly not a bad price, but potential buyers need to be aware that they are not getting a finished game. And that is a shame.