60
seconds
Waves of enemy ships dive at you down a corridor of stars, and each one carries a word. Type it and your fighter fires, one bolt per letter, until the ship comes apart. Miss too many and your shield starts to crack.
Your fighter sits at the bottom of the screen with three layers of shield around it. Ships appear at the far end of the starfield and fly toward you. Type the first letter of any word you can see and the game locks on to that ship, picking the closest one if two words start the same way. From then on every key you press goes to that target: a right letter fires a laser bolt, a wrong letter is a miss. Finish the word and the ship explodes. Press Esc if you want to drop the lock and deal with something closer.
The small interceptors carry short words, the wide rays a little longer, and the slow gunships carry the long ones. From wave four the gunships start dropping letter mines. A mine is a single letter in an orange ring, and one keypress shoots it down, even while you are halfway through another word.
Each wave sends more ships and sends them faster. Every fifth wave a mothership arrives with rings of armour. Each ring is its own word or a short two-word phrase, and each one you finish blows a ring off and knocks the ship back. Beat it and you get a shield back.
Once per wave you can press Enter to fire an EMP. It wipes every small ship on screen and stuns the big ones, so it is best saved for the moment four or five interceptors bunch up near you.
Starfall rewards the same habits that make you fast in a normal typing test: reading the next word while you finish the current one, and not hammering keys when you are under pressure. Because a single wrong key costs your multiplier, you learn quickly that steady and accurate beats frantic. Advanced mode sends ships sooner and gives them longer words, so it stays hard even at 90 words per minute. Your accuracy and WPM at the end are counted the same way as the main typing test, so the numbers mean something.
It counts as a miss: the label flashes red, the screen jolts and your combo resets. You keep your lock, so just type the right letter and carry on.
Press Esc to release the lock. Any damage you already did stays on that ship, so you can come back to it later and pick up where you left off.
Press Enter once per wave to destroy every small ship and letter mine on screen. Gunships, halo ships and motherships are only stunned and pushed back.
Yes. The playfield scales down to small screens and works with an on-screen keyboard, though a physical keyboard is much easier on later waves.