Game Reviews

Tap Busters: Galaxy Heroes review - A tapper that's just a little bit tapped out

Star onStar onStar onStar offStar off
Get
Tap Busters: Galaxy Heroes review - A tapper that's just a little bit tapped out

Tappers are a weird one. For the most part, the aim of the genre is to stop you from playing. Earn enough coins and the game will happily play itself while you get on with the business of pretending to be a grown up.

Tap Busters takes a slightly different approach though. It wants you to tap all the time. It wants you to pay attention. And it's a rhythm that doesn't quite work.

Once you've got bored of tapping, there's not much else here to keep you all that interested. That said, I am trying to type this review with one hand while still playing with the other.

Tap me, daddy

The game has a sci-fi theme. At the start you join a group of intergalactic bounty hunters. Your job is to shoot the big monsters that stand in front of you.

Killing things gets you coins, which you can use to upgrade your equipment. Killing big bads gets you different pieces of armour, new weapons, and additional familiars to try out.

The stream of money you're getting isn't as large as you might be used to in other clickers though. You're not going to be upgrading everything every forty seconds.

When you do upgrade there's an RPG-style skill tree to add points to. This let's you add more damage to your taps, or to the attacks of your sidekick. You can also give yourself more health. As you add points to the different branches of the tree you'll unlock new special skills as well.

The metagame underneath the play is actually pretty interesting. It's very much a case of smiling as your numbers go up. Different equipment has different elemental types, and some of them are stronger in certain levels.

There's a gem system as well that allows you to augment your weapons with different powers. And it's all deep enough that you want to keep going. Until your fingers get tired and you eventually want to stop.

You do earn some cash when you cease tapping, but it's not a huge amount. And while you can upgrade the mechanic, you're going to need to grind a lot or spend some cash to do it.

Click with you

If you're looking for an idler that takes away a good deal of the idling, then you're going to enjoy Tap Busters. It looks amazing, some of the character design is top notch, and there's a decent chunk of sci-fi humour running through it too.

I just can't imagine that there's that big an audience. There are less idle shooters and more idle clickers out there. Tap Busters occupies a middle ground that ends up feeling either underwhelming or overwhelming depending on your persuasion.

Tap Busters: Galaxy Heroes review - A tapper that's just a little bit tapped out

There's fun to be had here, but it gets bland pretty quickly
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.