Game Reviews

Tap Tap Radiation

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| Tap Tap Radiation
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Tap Tap Radiation
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| Tap Tap Radiation

When it comes to musical trends, every five years or so there's a swing from guitars to turntables and back again.

It's a meme developer Tapulous seems to be following in the evolution of its 30 million-downloaded Tap Tap Revenge series, which, graphically at least, is based on notes travelling down a guitar fretboard.

Tap Tap Radiation, its first iPad game, doesn't really change the sort of music you tap tap along to, but thanks to its three glowing, pulsing circles, which move around the screen as each track progresses, has much more of a club feel to it.

Groovy, baby

All you're doing is proving you've got rhythm in your fingers, and tapping a circle each time a note sphere zooms onto the screen. This loosely occurs in time with the beat of the track, with more spheres appearing more frequently depending on the level of difficulty.

Even on medium difficulty, you're bombarded with multitudes of notes. Perform well and you earn 16x multiplers, which you can also tap in time to boost up your score.

Tap Tap Radiation ships with a selection of music - Datarock, Richard Vission & Static Revenger, Mos Def, The Feature, and Serge Devant - but there's a new free track available weekly, plus another 30+ tracks in a free pack, as well as the usual array of premium tunes from Lady Gaga, Pink, and others.

After all, Tap Tap Radiation is free with just one ad displayed when you launch the game, so Tapulous has to make its money somehow.

Encore, encore

In terms of prolonged gameplay, that's really down to how competitive you are. The game stores your daily high score for each track and difficulty leve. There's a maximum of four, but some free tracks come with fewer.

You can also see the global top 20 scores for each setting, although that's often fairly depressing in terms of highlighting just how little rhythm you have.

It's best just to find a track you like and tap along in your own special style. Surprisingly, my favourite proved to Hole's 'Skinny Little Bitch', even if it summoned up thoughts of Courtney Love telling off her daughter (probably just me).

Got the look

The graphics are pretty neat, too - it's the high quality presentation you expect from Tapulous with glowing trails following your fingers, to the 3-2-1 countdown you get when you pause, and even push notifications from another game.

It's no surprise, then, that Tap Tap Radiation has been one of the most popular free apps on iPad.

It's not groundbreaking, but it provides sufficient variation on the Tap Tap Revenge series that existing fans and those coming to it new via iPad will find plenty to enjoy.

Tap Tap Radiation

Tap Tap Radiation isn't a radical departure from Tap Tap Revenge, but it's enough of a remix to keep your fingers tapping along to the music
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Jon Jordan
Jon Jordan
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon can turn his hand to anything except hand turning. He is editor-at-large at PG.biz which means he can arrive anywhere in the world, acting like a slightly confused uncle looking for the way out. He likes letters, cameras, imaginary numbers and legumes.