Super Tap! Review

Super Tap! (out now, $0.99) by Void Games is not out to break new ground. It’s much happier breaking tiny colored squares instead. In fact, that’s pretty much the entire game in a nutshell: you tap squares. Occasionally you’ll get a powerup or something, and eventually the top of the screen will come crashing down and you’ll die, but that’s really the gist of it. Tappin’. Let’s hope you’re super at it.

ru1a0uxsIn some ways the game reminds me of the early days of the App Store, when developers were still trying to figure out fun ways of interacting with a touchscreen. Super Tap!, with its bright colors, catchy music, and solid (albeit simple) tapping mechanic would have surely been a hit in those days. Today, not so much, unfortunately. As of this writing the Game Center leaderboards show exactly 77 players.

It’s a little depressing, because clearly some effort went into the game, despite its simple premise. A wall of colored squares slowly falls down the screen, and your job is to tap one specific color (indicated in the top right). Every ten seconds or so the color changes, and if you accidentally hit a different one the top of the screen shifts down, obscuring more and more of the play field. If the top hits the bottom, it’s game over. That’s it.

It’s not much more than a nice time waster, but one thing that elevates it a bit is the sense of style. The colors themselves are bright and cheery, with just a bit of darkness in the menus for contrast. The music is catchy and urgent, cheering you on and daring you to screw up at the same time. Overall everything looks and sounds top-notch.

The other thing the makes it a little more interesting than it should be is the eventual realization that you’re not playing against the game; you’re playing against you. See, the game itself doesn’t care if you tap anything at all. There’s no timer, so you can just let it run without any input whatsoever and keep a score of 0 going for all eternity. Once you start tapping, though, there’s a chance you’ll slip up and end it. There’s a subtle layer of risk and reward, then, as you try to keep one eye on the squares and another on the color indicator at the top, trying to squeeze in just a few more taps of green before it changes to pink or some other color. It’s not a deep experience, exactly, but it’s also not quite as simple as its cheery rectangles would have you believe.

iFanzine Verdict: Void Games’ Super Tap! is a great example of a game that could have been popular in 2008 when the App Store first opened its digital doors. Unfortunately, that was nearly six years ago, and these days people seem more interested in games that have cutting edge 3D graphics (or at least flapping). It’s a shame, because as simple as it is, it’s also a good bit of fun — especially on the second and third difficulties when things really ramp up. It won’t blow your hair back, but for a buck, Super Tap! does enough things right to get a recommend.