Wednesday App Review: Tap Titans

I’ve never been a huge fan of tap games. There are a few exceptions, of course, but overall I find them a little tedious. However, after reading the fantastic reviews on the mobile game Tap Titans, I decided to download it to see what the fuss is about. And, around 70 levels later, I still don’t understand what everyone is talking about. At its core, Tap Titans is your traditional tapping game where the faster you tap, the more damage you do to the surprisingly adorable monsters that pop up on screen. Once you kill them, the titans explode into a shower of coins, which you can then collect and use to hire little heroes to help you. Those heroes can then be leveled up to help you do more damage per second (dps) and destroy the monsters. As you kill more monsters and bosses, you advance through different levels, which basically just means that the background changes. However, I personally found the game exceedingly boring. Aside from the fact that its primary mechanic is tapping really fast, the statistics on this game quickly get out of proportion. For example, at level 70, my heroes on their own, do 113.48 trillion damage per second. and when I tap, that number jumps up to around 320 trillion per second. The issue is the ridiculous number ramp that this game experiences. For example, upgrades for my heroes cost several trillion for only a few billion extra damage per second and it’s up to me to decide if an additional 689.32 billion damage (added to the 9.21 trillion damage the hero currently does) is worth 560.77 trillion coins. I don’t even know where to begin to decide who to upgrade or how this is supposed to work, and that’s not even going into the units beyond a trillion, which are becoming common at this level in the game. That enormously large number is represented by the unit aa, and I have yet to figure out what that even stands for. In short, while it might just be my terrible math skills, the numbers seem too big for me to really grasp well, and it kind of makes it pointless much past about level 50. I don’t understand why the incredible ramp up that’s going on here is necessary. What happened to good old-fashioned magic items or strategy to amp up a game? There are some additional elements to this tapping frenzy, including the ability to upgrade your hero, purchase (or earn) diamonds for additional powerups, and relics at level 80 (which, I’m sorry dear readers, but I just didn’t have the patience to get that far). There is also a social aspect to the game as well, if you have any friends you can sucker into this time sink, and your heroes do fight while you’re away which encourages leaving the game alone for a bit to collect gold, then level everything and tap into the next level. I suppose if you’re really addicted to tapping your screen and don’t actually care about advancing anywhere, this game would be a great option. The good news is that there really aren’t many ads, and the in-game purchases are far from necessary as you earn diamonds with achievements anyway. It can be downloaded for free on Google Play, iTunes, and the Amazon App Store.]]>