In recent history, “Clicker” games have become a huge craze. Tap Tap Legions is the newest Clicker game to hit Steam, and compared to some others out there… It’s a bit of a mess. Let’s begin.
Tap Tap Legions (- Epic battles in 5 seconds, but I’m not going to use the full name for once) follows the story of a newlywed king and queen. Unfortunately, the queen gets kidnapped and the king must go after her! Or if you want to follow how the achievements say it, he’s off to rescue the gueen. You’ll need to “tap” your way through 60+ levels to rescue her. Are you up for the task?
First things first: forget the idea of tapping. Ignoring the fact that on PC the only “tapping” that can be done is with touch screen, you should just not go with the clicking method of playing this game. During the levels, you send out troops from the INSANELY LARGE icons on the bottom half of the screen. You can forget actually watching the battles too, as you need to pay attention to the bottom half to catch your timers. The difficulty ramps up fast, meaning you’ll need to adapt to trying to get your troops out as best as you can.
“So Erin, you said to not use the clicking method to play. How are we supposed to play!?” Thank you for asking! You see, the other control method for the PC version of this game involves the keyboard. To split up the 6 on-screen prompts, there are three keys per hand. For some reason, the developer of this game decided that the left hand keys should be ASD, completely breaking natural typing patterns. While the right hand is thankfully JKL, the left hand is absolutely screwed up, and I found myself hitting the wrong keys because I kept trying to go into a natural typing setup.
So now that I have that out of the way, this gets even better! In theory, there should be strategy in what troops you deploy. And sure, there is a bit of strategy, but it’s not really the kind of strategy you’re thinking of. The best strategy I found for completing levels, including when level 5 was ridiculously difficult, was just mashing all six keys at once whenever one timer was up. Now you do need to be a tiny bit careful as there are some negative effects you can trigger, but as long as you avoid those, you’re golden. Even with making quite a few errors and accidentally triggering these bad effects, I still was able to recover and win without much difficulty.
The bad effects in this game, at least as far as I could stand to play, are a bit annoying. For each section of a level you have a timer, and one of the effects you can get is either time added or subtracted. The other main bad effect I encountered was the bombs, and for some reason they’re reverse of what you’d think they should be. The purple bomb with a skull is the positive one – it deals massive damage to the enemy side. The negative one is the nice and shiny golden bomb. I can get that it fits with the fact the negative time effect is also orange, but it just seems really odd.
As you progress through the levels, you’ll gain access to more troops and items. The items make it even clearer that this is a mobile port. They require you to use your mouse to do some sort of interaction on the battlefield. Now, I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t have 3 hands to be able to this while also deploying my troops and getting my boosts.
Troops each have their own effect, though what you’ll get is random since each has a percentage chance to appear in the action bar. There’s archers, mages, and front-line troops that you can get. To upgrade these troops, you’ll need to get gold. Gold is earned from either completion of levels or using real money to purchase of it. You can’t go back and farm previous levels for gold either, meaning you’re stuck with whatever current level you’re on to try and get the gold.
So if the overly large icons and items didn’t make it clear that this was a mobile port, the real money purchase option for gold does. You are offered a certain amount of gold for however much money you spend from the options available. While I’ll leave the rant about in-game purchases for another day, it does make me absolutely sick to see this sort of stuff present within Steam games like this.
Tap Tap Legions is a game you should just give a complete pass to. The control mechanic for a “PC” game is absolutely messed up, there’s an insanely cheap way to just get through the levels, and the music is exceptionally annoying on top of it all. The graphics look extremely washed out and far too stretched out on a monitor as well, leaving me to wonder how it even looks on mobile (I’m not exactly keen on going to find out). There are far better “Clicker” games out there, and there are also far better free games available. Just save your time and carpal and don’t even give Tap Tap Legions any of your time.
Tap Tap Legions Review Score
.5/5
I’d also like to point out that these battles are neither “epic” nor are they “5 seconds”. They are boring, you can’t even watch them, and they take over a minute in general.
