Tap Tap: Idle City Builder Sim 5.3.1
Free Version
High hopes turn to teeth grinding
To start off on the right idea, I was only interested in Tap Tap Builder because of the graphical presentation. Then some PlayStore review exclaimed how great it is that you can merely tap on buildings to speed up everything. So I have to admit that I left my guard down while I was gleefully going through the game's first few minutes.
However, in good Freemium fashion, after the cascade of simple tasks with beefy rewards finally dried up, the game came to a painful crawl that only real money can fix. But let's not stray too far from exploring the game itself.
Tap Tap Builder is a bare-bones city building game. You're thrown on a leveled island which you must populate with roads, power stations, apartments, offices, and many other blocky structures. You will need to place most buildings next to road tiles, but as city planning goes, there are no mechanisms or combos that would otherwise influence your decisions.
The holy trinity of Population, Money, and Energy is firmly in place here. However, Tap Tap Builder also includes two more currencies in the form of Concrete and Metal. The more offices and apartments you construct the better, but you'll also need to make sure you also build the appropriate industrial buildings to cover for the increasing material costs.
Upgrading your buildings goes beyond the aesthetics as it seems to be necessary. While you won't have problems with real estate anytime soon, there are a couple of things that can go out of hand if you expand too quickly. Fire and Crime are two stats that don't wait for you to get ready. To reduce the risk of losing buildings and the certainty of losing money while you're idle, you will need to build Firehouses and Police stations. These structures are expensive, and can only cover for a limited number of buildings/population. This mechanic forces you to develop upwards. You can also upgrade these two control facilities, but since upgrades are much more costly than new buildings, you're left with no other alternative, which is somewhat frustrating.
Now, the tapping part is relatively obscure in this game. You can speed-up construction and also boost any of your resource production by tapping and holding the appropriate buttons. However, this costs energy, another scarce resource, as you'll come to realize. However, when it comes to constructions, you can tap on the wrench button instead of holding it to progress without spending energy. Playing like this is doable, but frustrating as it's tiring. Also resting your finger will inadvertently drain energy, which you obviously don't want in this instance. This scheme will either produce fist clenching and teeth grinding until will force you to give up in favor of the costlier method. Not fun. Either way, production boosters don't even feature tapping, so you might as well forget about it.
Final Thoughts
Tap Tap Builder is lovely to behold, but to reach the level of eye candy that's featured on official screenshots and in the video trailer; you'll either have to pay or wait for a very long time.
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