Tap Heroes Review: Tapped Out

So I played Cookie Clicker back when that was a popular thing, I’ve been playing Tap Titans on my iPad as something to do when I need to kill some time, and just now I’ve sunk about a solid 45 minutes into Tap Heroes…just because.

For those of you who don’t recognize any of those titles, all three of those games belong to this new wave of RPG-esque games where players must tap/click on an item many, many, many times in order to progress through the game. In the case of Tap Titans and Tap Heroes, players tap the enemy in order to deal damage to them. The more you tap/click the more damage you do. The goal is to kill the monster before it kills you.

It sounds simple because it is.

As you repeatedly click on the monster to continue slaying monster after monster, you’ll gradually level up your abilities and collect additional party members. Each slain beast drops some gold which can be used to upgrade your poke abilities or your small crew of heroes’ strengths.

In Tap Heroes I have acquired a knight, a wizard, and a rogue. The knight is my front line; he can take a lot of hits and deals damage in hefty bursts. The mage is in charge of healing the knight, ensuring that he never takes too much damage, and the rogue hangs out in the back shooting poison arrows that slow and damage the enemy over time. Meanwhile I sit and click, and click, and click, and click on the enemy until they die.

At first, I was baffled as to why these games caught on. They’re hardly games, really, as you don’t even need to be present to “play” them. In fact, as I write this, I have Tap Heroes muted, running in the background. The game progresses rather slowly without my almighty clicks battering enemies into oblivion, but it still progresses. Even if I were to close the entire game out, I would log back in and be greeted with the large sum of gold that my heroes have aquired while I was away from the game.

This allows me to, hypothetically, open the game up a few times throughout the day, spend my gold on upgrading my heroes, hit the “next level” button to progress to the next level, and then exit the game, just to repeat the process over a bit later. That’s more of a chore than a game, if you ask me.

However, the chore aspect of it is masked by the immediate gratification of watching the enemy’s health bar whittle away with every single click. After slaying ten enemies in a row, the next level will open up with the fanfare of a kazoo. That little kazoo noise is so satisfying to hear that I’m guilty of having sat through a few levels, mindlessly clicking, just because I wanted to hear that sound again. Not to mention the sound of the gold when you pick it up…that little money-jingle is dangerously satisfying.

One issue the game has that is very hard for me to overlook is the fact that it only has two resolution options: default and full screen. The default size is about the size of a smartphone screen, on your desktop screen, while full screen stretches the view out to fill up the screen. You’re stuck playing Tap Heroes in a small window, or full screen with fuzzy graphics and just poor visual quality. I don’t have a problem when developers port a mobile game to the PC…I do have a problem when they do a lazy job of it.

Is Tap Heroes fun? No. Is it satisfying? Yes. Is it hard to stop playing? Maybe for some. It’s addictive, and if you let it, it can sink it’s claws into you until it just embeds itself into your daily routine, becoming one with you.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some gold to collect.