Game Reviews

Tap Tap Revenge Tour

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iOS
| Tap Tap Revenge Tour
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Tap Tap Revenge Tour
|
iOS
| Tap Tap Revenge Tour

The idea of dancing with your fingers is a rather odd one. Would you try to impress the lady or gent of your dreams by drumming away on a table seductively? Well, you might, but we doubt you'd get more than a worried look.

That's what the Tap Tap series has essentially tasked us with doing ever since the release of the very first iPhone in 2007 - translating the medium of dance into a nervous hand-exercise.

Tap Tap Revenge Tour looks to overhaul this successful premise, with mixed results.

Familiar tune

At its heart, Tap Tap Revenge Tour offers the same brand of accessible finger-tapping as it ever did.

Popular music tracks play in the background. Notes stream down three parallel strings, demanding to be tapped, slashed, or held when they hit the bottom - which usually coincides with the beat or melody of the song. There's also a shake manoeuvre that works in the same way.

This is fine - Tap Tap games have always been good clean casual fun, especially for pop fans. There are still a few too many occasions where the action appears out of sync with the music track, but it's solid enough overall.

Musical composition

The real changes here are structural. Each day you find yourself able to access a new gig venue in a new country. Each location offers five chances to blast through five different songs (three performances and two encores).

You're offered a new location and a new free song to download every day, but the only snag is you're unable to skip forward to the next challenge - you have to wait for the next day to roll around in real time.

This succeeds in capturing a little of that live performance feel, but it also unwittingly captures some of the frustration of life on the road - you're always waiting for the next performance.

Tap Tap Revenge Tour also suffers from an increasingly familiar reliance on in-app purchases, and - as with so many other recent iOS games - you'll eventually find yourself out of the in-game currency and unable to take part in the daily performances without an outlay.

There's nothing inherently wrong with Tap Tap Revenge Tour. It's essentially more of the same, and for free at that. We're not convinced by the new world tour structure, though, which does little more than place limits on the amount of fun you can have with the game.

Tap Tap Revenge Tour

The same old Tap Tap beat-matching gameplay we love, applied to an oddly restrictive structure we don't
Score
Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.