I've been training my whole life for a battle royale like Final Sentence, it's just a shame the demo is a tad undercooked right now

Two nervous hands look at a typewriter in Final Sentence, a typing battle royale game. — (Image credit: Button Mash)

I've been typing for most of my life—flogging flax so I could afford a dragon longsword in RuneScape, roleplaying in World of Warcraft, and at present, writing multiple articles a day for the good site PC Gamer. I average about 130 words per minute, which isn't competitive or anything, but I'm pretty nippy compared to the average pecker (it's a typing term, stop giggling).

I've long believed I would never be able to translate these skills to gaming. I mean, sure, you've got games like Typing of the Dead, but I don't do anything if it doesn't have bragging rights. I'm told that's 'mean-spirited' and 'narcissistic' and 'unhealthily competitive', but those people were all losers anyway.

Your job is to type faster than everyone else in the lobby. Make a mistake, and you get a strike. Make three strikes, and you get to play Russian roulette—adding a bullet each time your vigilant overseer gives their revolver a spin.

However, the moment someone hits first place, everybody else dies—which renders the fact you've got an overall timer kinda pointless. Anyone who's a touch-typist like yours truly is going to be done well before anybody's personal timer runs down.

Thirdly, if you do make mistakes, it's hard to catch up. Each 'round', usually consisting of a few sentences, has a mandatory wait timer in between bouts of click-claking. This, I assume, is to give your tired little fingies a break—but it also means the winner will have their lead maintained artificially. The Russian roulette animation is also slow as hell, and while I get that it's part of the punishment, it puts you so far behind that you might as well alt+F4 and go next if you bump into it.

There's also the matter of the text itself. It's super early-days, but from what I've played, you can count the amount of unique scripts you're tasked to write on two hands. While I did have a chuckle writing out "the cow says moo" or "can I haz cheezeburger" or, in one instance, an incredibly horny script that made me filthy typing it (still won, though), I probably shouldn't be seeing repeats in my first half-hour. Some of them have typos, too, which is just mean.

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Screenshots from Final Sentence, a battle royale typing game where you need to avoid being shot in a warehouse. — (Image credit: Button Mash)

I think Final Sentence would be better served by a round-by-round elimination system, Fall Guys style, where the slowest few typists are eliminated—and everyone else is given a reset. Even when someone was matching my WPM, it rarely felt competitive, because they'd forgotten to put a hyphen in the right place one too many times and had to watch discount V slowly spin a revolver at them, giving me an insurmountable—and kinda boring—lead.

Still, it's early days, and developer Button Mash has every chance of turning it into something better. You can give Final Sentence a try yourself right now on Steam.

Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.

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