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Review

Bored of this now

by J Nash (November 16th, 2010 at 8:40 pm)

Game: Tap of the Dead. Publisher: Try This. Authors: Txkel. Supports Openfeint. Price: £1.19/€1,59/$1.99. Buy the game.

Let’s make this super-fast, I have a bus to catch.

Tap of the Dead is rubbish.

Everyone loves Typing of the Dead, but nobody’s yet worked out how to rip it off properly for the iThing. Texting of the Bread tried hard but forgot you were supposed to be a game to start with then add the typing on top. Tap of the Dead cleverly avoids the problems with touchscreen typing but forgets to be a game at all.

Zombs lunge at you from static screens, each labelled with a string of symbols — a cross, a triangle, a diamond and a circle. Tap the matching screen corners to kill the zomb. The plan is simple but ingenious.

Here’s where it goes wrong.

All of the icons are blue (turning red on a successful shot), so nothing jumps out. A rare example of a game commendably supporting colourblindness, except at the expense of everyone else.

There’s no correlation between an icon and its corner, so you repeatedly have to glance across to check which is which. I can see this is supposed to resemble a joypad, but without the tactile element nothing sticks in the mind. They’d really have done better just using 1-2-3-4.

You can’t select which zomb to attack. You have to go in game order even if a newer zomb is approaching faster.

Relatedly, hitting a zomb has no effect — they’re not knocked back or interrupted in their attack. It’s kill them or nothing. (But wait! I’m sure I pulled this off by accident during yet another level repeat, halting a sprinting zomb. Or did I imagine it? It’s in no way reliable anyway.)

The icon strings are longer than the screen can show; to be fair, usually by only a couple of blobs, but still breaking the link between action and result. You can’t jump your concentration to the next zomb, you always have to wait to see if more icons are going to scroll in.

Relatedly, zomb strings overlap and when you’re hit blood splashes all over the screen. The icons remain clear, but the whole thing’s just a huge bumbling mess.

Relatedly, there appears to be no link between the distance away a zomb is and the zomb’s ability to hit you. (To be fair, this could be some kind of special zomb attack, but it occurs right from the beginning.)

Relatedly, icons have no connective logic. If you’re typing, you instantly absorb the displayed word or sentence and know which letters come next. Here, you have to keep manually matching the blobs. (In a clear admission this doesn’t come off, each round features the same zombs labelled with the same icons. So it’s a reflex memory game.)

The game has a confused idea about when you die. You can survive being eaten point blank indefinitely until you press an icon, at which point the sound jams forever until you quit.

I didn’t even make it to Chapter 2 of Tap of the Dead and really don’t care. Continuing only works for chapters, so every time you die you have to start again; there are at least five levels in a chapter. There’s also a Survival mode, which compresses all the design errors into one screen and is comically abrupt. (I can last about four seconds.) There’s a good idea in the middle of Tap of the Dead, but tragically it’s been turned into this game.

I have missed my bus.

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