FingerGaming

Rating:

• Price: $0.99 (Get it)
• Version: 1.0
• Official Site: EpicTilt

It’s a dream-come-true scenario for fans of the rhythm genre. Through a special licensing agreement with Sony Music Entertainment, TapStar developer EpicTilt has gained full, nearly unrestricted access to many artists in Sony’s catalog.

The exchange? Each track in the game is accompanied by a download link that allows users to instantly buy the featured song and add it to their iPod library. It’s such a simple and effective marketing tool that I can’t believe that no other publisher has attempted it before, and I’d be wary of its legitimacy if EpicTilt hadn’t previously established licensing agreements with heavy-hitters like ESPN, Interscope and Universal.

Imagine — a music game where any artist from a company’s entire catalog could be featured as downloadable content. The results could have been incredible.

While TapStar has the potential to offer greater musical variety than any previous game in the genre, however, its unprecedented licensing agreement with Sony is squandered on a title that suffers from a disappointing tracklist and mediocre gameplay.

TapStar’s gameplay follows the basic Dance Dance Revolution model. Arrows scroll up from the bottom of the screen to the beat of a background music track. When the arrows align with a set of silhouettes at the top, players must press the corresponding arrows located at the corners of the screen.

It’s worth noting that TapStar’s gameplay is strictly old-school DDR, with no frills whatsoever. No scroll modifiers, speed selection options, or freeze notes are found here. TapStar feels like a step back to the early years of DDR, with its small tracklist and barebones gameplay.

Unfortunately, TapStar’s note patterns lack the fun that characterized even the earliest DDR releases. On its tougher difficulties, Dance Dance Revolution mixes up its note patterns to keep players challenged and interested. DDR’s cues may even follow different parts of the music, often timing themselves to a syncopated vocal track, or a tricky bass line.

TapStar’s patterns show no such ingenuity. Even on TapStar’s highest difficulty, songs often amount to long stretches of repetitive cues mapped to a quarter-note beat. The designers also really seem to like simultaneous button presses — you’ll grow sick of these before your first song has ended. Lengthy streams of alternating double-notes aren’t challenging; they’re annoying.

Some tracks even go so far as the make the player press all four buttons at once at certain points. Again, this is not challenging — it simply shows a complete lack of understanding of what makes a DDR-styled game interesting or fun to play. Thanks to the lack of care put into its note charts, TapStar never becomes a challenge, even on its toughest difficulty levels.

Then there’s the tracklist itself, which falls short of nearly every other music game I’ve played in terms of quality and variety. Gameplay aside, one of the reasons why a game like Rock Band 2 succeeds is because of the great diversity in its featured music.

In comparison, nearly half of TapStar’s tracklist is composed of the kind of putrid adolescent pop that you can never seem to skip fast enough when you’re flipping through the local radio stations. The remaining half of the tracklist is either overplayed (“Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”) or completely unsuited for rhythm-based gameplay (“Suspicious Minds”).

Outside of its mediocre music selection and uninspired gameplay, players will find little else to like in TapStar. There’s no campaign mode or any sort of progression to gameplay. There are no multiplayer modes. The possibility of downloadable tracks expands the replay value a bit, but if they turn out anything like the app’s default songs, it’s likely that you’re only going to want to suffer through their boring note patterns once before never touching them again.

While TapStar certainly has the capacity for greatness, the app in its current form is more disappointing than fun. Here’s hoping that future updates improve its gameplay, expand its tracklist, and help TapStar realize its full potential.

Tags: dance dance revolution, epictilt, Music, rhythm, sony, tapstar