House of the Dead is an inherently campy series, so this game goes full on and embraces the camp to its utmost extent. Out with guns, in with keyboards, with the in game models adjusted accordingly. The projectiles that zombies throw at you are also now comical weapons like plastic hammers and frying pans rather than blades, there is no semblance of seriousness here. It knows that it's a version of house of the dead where you kill enemies by typing words on a keyboard, and it plays that to its strength.

You'd think that something like this would be really gimmicky, but it's actually kinda crazy how well the core feelings of HoTD translate over to ToTD. Speed and accuracy are still an absolute must for survival, just now instead of quickly aiming and firing gunshots, it's all about accurate and fast typing. There's still a solid sense of thrill to it, though I did notice from playing this back-to-back with the regular game that they adjusted a lot of zombie placements to have more things to type. The difficulty is also rather inconsistent, as it's really all up to the luck of whether or not the game will spit out an easy-to-type phrase on enemies that will give you enough time to type the whole thing out. Couple that with the lack of any real ability to switch targets once you commit to typing, and sometimes a stray projectile can cost you a life that you otherwise would have been able to save. It's goofier House of the Dead with some minor pacing differences.

I remember back when I got this game I thought that this was all I could ever need in the series, that nothing else in the house of the dead series could ever be as good as this so I shouldn't even bother. Ironically, I think by now after playing both games a solid amount of time, I've grown to actually prefer killing zombies with a gun over a keyboard. So while this game is still a genius idea with solid execution, don't be like me and have this be all you play in the series for several years.