Parents' Guide to Text or Die

Who knew that having a robust vocabulary would be a life-saving skill? Still, that's the premise behind Text or Die. And it's a fairly interesting premise, challenging players to come up with the most long-winded responses to random trivia. Unfortunately, nearly every single bit of the delivery on the premise falls short of even the lowest expectations. For starters, while this might looks like a multiplayer game, it's not. All of your opponents are randomly generated by the computer and few every seem to present much challenge. In fact, the biggest challenge is coping with the game's very limited and often confusing selection of what it considers correct answers.

As a game where the goal is answering questions with the longest word, it's understandable that Text or Die requires the answer to be spelled correctly. But there are times where even correctly spelled words are considered wrong. And then there are the game's generically described categories, which are widely open to interpretation. Many of these seem more like they're left to the whim of the developers' preferences than actual answers. Oftentimes, you'll spell out a word that clearly fits in a category but is rejected, while the AI selects an answer that doesn't have even the most tenuous connection to the subject but somehow passes muster. Finally, the in-game ads are overwhelming. Between pop-ups, banners, etc. being shoved into your face at any given moment, even during a match, it starts to feel like the game is nothing more than what happens between the ads instead of the other way around.