Tap Tap Revenge 4 Review - DDR for your fingers, or is it?

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Published on Saturday, 27 August 2011 09:53

Some iOS to Android ports are playable, some aren’t and then there is Tap Tap Revenge 4, the Android port edition. We find what bothers us, what we like and what needs changed before anyone spends there hard earned cash on any song packs.

Title: Tap Tap Revenge 4 | Developer: Tapulous | Genre: Arcade | Players: 1 | Version: 4.1.3 | Size: 11MB | Price: Free (More songs cost extra)

Tap Tap Revenge is a lot like DDR for your fingers. You tap colors, stars and other animations to music that’s popular now, and that you’ve heard a quarter million times on the radio. As long as you play well, you’ll earn an exponential multiplier. Instead of adding to all the colors as you advance, the multiplier functions for a certain amount of time before ending.

As you progress, gain experience and waste hours playing, you will be rewarded with more songs or coins, which can be used to redeem songs or other things for customizing your avatar. The song collection is disappointing and the free songs are even worse most of the time.

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We mentioned this, and we’ll say it again:  this is a port of an iOS game, and it smells like it in more ways than it should. While you can use the back button within the interface, this is only true sometimes, however, when this isn’t true (and even when it is), there exists a home icon that takes you back, duplicating functionality while not following Android design principles. Many developers have ported their games to Android successfully all the while retaining the quality of the game and using Android design features. This isn't true here at all.

Like many iOS ports Tap Tap Revenge 4 runs a 5.9-6.7MB service on the phone at start up, that serves as far as we can tell – no purpose. This was more commonly seen before Android had the power behind it that it goes so quickly. It uses this RAM/CPU time to get your location and advertise to you. There is no paid version of Tap Tap Revenge 4 available on the Market without the ads plastered on the menus.

To further demonstrate how poorly this game was ported, some song pack purchases open the browser, connecting to the iOS app store website where you proceed to not buying the song pack. We’re not sure if this is something that’s being worked on, or if the iOS links are there simply as placeholders because not enough content exists for the Android version of the game. However, this is pure speculation. As a result, it appears in-app purchases are not fully functional within this game, combined with a lack of developer support. There have been few to no updates for Tap Tap Revenge 4.

We know we sound like we’re ranking on this game, but it’s because it is truly that bad. Menus are impossible to use, gameplay feels standard at this point from playing DDR, and graphics are under-done, even for what looks like a guitar-hero clone. Don't download this for free, unless you like 30 second trials of songs and bad free music.

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