Tapic Review

Tapic is a typical rhythm game that does something that is fairly unique. It takes any song on your iDevice and converts it to a playable "Tap Tap Revolution"-like game level. Once the song is in the game, it automatically stores it along with its album art to prevent duplicate conversion. Assuming that you have a ton of music (doesn't everybody?), Tapic really becomes a game with infinite replayability.

The first concern that I had was how well the game would translate each song into a level. To test this, I threw in a few different songs from a few different genres. Most songs translated quite well, with the best being super clean electronica and electronic influenced rock. Songs by Phoenix and some of the cleaner Radiohead tunes worked particularly well.

On the other hand, Rap was a bit tougher for the conversion process to manage. If the rap was more beat based, the game worked just fine, but the more lyrics there were, the stranger the level became. First, I tried Hustlin by Rick Ross (ha, I love my song selection), and it worked out well; the rapping was clear enough to get a consistent beat. I tried some MF Doom next and had some mixed results. Some of his songs had clear beats and came out well, but some had too many lyrics at the same time which left gaps in playtime. The game didn't freak out or anything, just no dots came down.

The worst experience though, by far, was trying to play the game with At The Drive In. Apparently the wall of sound isn't translated well by Tapic, and the game barely spits out any dots at all. I was expecting an extremely difficult level and ended up scoring 96%, the best of all of my songs. Go figure.

Even when the game it as its best though (at the hardest difficulty level) it really isn't that hard. Because the game converts the songs into gameplay instantly, there aren't any special features in the levels. There are no slides (chances to hold down a button), no extra instruments, and no power ups: just straight up gameplay. The buttons also linger a bit too long in their "hit" position, making hitting pairs a bit too easy. For instance, if two buttons come down at the same time, you don't necessarily have to hit them at the same time, just relatively soon after each other.

To keep things fresh, even though the gameplay varies very little because of the lack of slides and power ups, you can unlock different backgrounds and game view modes along the way. It's not much, but it adds a bit to the experience.

If you are looking for a Tap Tap Revolution-like experience and are tired of playing the same old corporate stuff, give Tapic a try. It's only 99 cents, and if you like how it plays, it has as much replayability as you have music.