Game Review??? I've never done a review of anything and I'd like to be confident enough to say this blog post is indeed a game review but I have this odd feeling that I am missing out on a specific format or guideline of game reviews, Haha. I have seen reviews of other people and I'm not basing mine off anything so I apologise if this isn't your idea of a game review, this is my first time, and here is my game review for two smartphone game applications!
I use a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and above is a photograph of it, displaying my Games Folder (I am a total neat freak, hehehe). I have a couple games on there but the two games that I have been completely obsessing over the past few days are Disney's Tsum Tsum and Tap Titans! So, let's get right into it!
DISNEY'S TSUM TSUMS
I'm sure my obsession of Disney Tsum Tsums are super obvious by now, haha. This game really escalated it. Anyway, the game is free on the playstore and is also available on apple products. There are in-app purchases but I don't find much use in them. The game is powered by the LINE app, a free chat application. Now, it isn't completely necessary to play the game with a LINE account. You can play as a guest but if you have a LINE account, there are definitely perks: you can play alongside your friends, save all your data and save all the Tsum Tsums collected. If you decide to play as a guest and then play using your new LINE account, your previous data as a guest will be deleted (I learned this firsthand. Whoops.)
After watching the totally adorable opening sequence and clicking "Tap To Start", this is what the home screen looks like. Since I am logged onto my LINE account, I see the friends who also have and/or play the game and how they are doing! This includes their highest score of the week and the current Tsum they use. This is the fun part because there is always a little bit of friendly competition when you play. The players who rank 1st, 2nd and 3rd in each week get special prizes!
The five hearts above represent the energy you possess to play the game. It costs one heart to play one game and takes 15 minutes for you to get another heart. This is a great feature because it helps you rot away into the game less than you would if playing the game didn't cost hearts (At least, I know I would just be playing for hours to no end if it weren't for this, Hahaha!) However, if you play with friends, you can send each other hearts every hour and even ask for hearts if you're desperate. The mail box is a notification area where you usually see and claim rewards from friends, missions and achievements. Above all of this, you can see your level and progress, coins you've collected and rubies! Coins can be used to buy boxes which I will discuss in a bit and rubies can be exchanged into coins!
You can also invite friends to get more coins! You can invite friends who have LINE accounts and earn 500 coins for every invite. Once you've invited 5 people, you can get a Happiness box; 15 people, a Premium Box; and 30 people, the Little Green Men Tsum Tsum! I only have a few friends on line, so I can't invite anymore people ; A ; Want to play with me? My LINE username is dingrayson !!
If you click the lower right box with the tsum tsum and store icon, you'll be redirected to the window of Tsum Tsums you have collected! You can collet over 40+ Tsum Tsums at the moment and there are always more to come, the newest as of today is Rapunzel and Pascal! It shows the statistics of every Tsum you own, as well as the different skills that come with them! Right now my MyTsum is Rapnuzel. When you set a Tsum Tsum as your MyTsum, you get to use its skill during every game you play. You can only set one MyTsum at a time but you can switch between the ones you own. Each Tsum Tsum has different skills and they help in various ways. Some help earn more coins, others help collect more points - and some, even both! Set your MyTsum to however you prefer, or your favourite character! Sometimes setting it to your favourite character doesn't help so much... but I'm happy that the ones that I rack up the most points and coins with are my favourites: Rapunzel and Elsa!
Here is how you collect each Tsum. You get them through a Happiness Box for 10,000 coins or the Premium Box for 30,000 coins. Each box will give you 1 (one) random Tsum Tsum, the list of what possible Tsum Tsums you can get from each box can be seen in the game. Here I just bought a Premium Box from the Tsum Tsum store and when I opened it I got, Rapunzel! I was so happy!! C:
TIP: I would suggest saving up and only buying the Premium Boxes for now because the Tsum Tsums inside help collect more coins and points as compared to the Tsum Tsums you can get out of the Happiness Boxes. 30,000 coins seems a lot when you first start out but with the help of the right Tsum Tsums, it wasn't so hard anymore. I earn about 15,000 - 20,000 coins when I play each day so it really isn't too hard buying Premium Boxes anymore.
TIP 2: I do not have a lot of Tsum Tsums, but with the ones I've played with I find that from the Happiness Boxes, Chip earns me the most coins. While from the Premium Boxes, it's definitely Elsa and Rapunzel. Mike from Monsters Inc. and Marie from the Aristocats also help, but mostly on points!
Before you start a game, you will see Bonus items you can use for a game. I've personally not used any of them, I've been tempted to use the coins at first but I realised it would be useless since you spend 500 coins to use the power up but every normal game earns me about 300 to 400 coins so I don't really get what I paid for. I'm sure they come in handy if you're trying to win first place against your friends with highest scores but at the moment, I really won't recommend it.
The game itself is a very simple, connect-the-same-characters-to-pop-them-and-earn-points kind of game. It's very much like Bejeweled and the Bubble Pop game - but a million times cuter as you can see. It's very simple and easy to understand. There is even a tutorial when you first start up the application that lets you get a gist of the game. The only thing I didn't like about the tutorial was that it was very vague about some other things, which I learned while I was playing on my own.
As I mentioned earlier, there are skills for every MyTsum. A skill can be activated if you pop enough of your MyTsum's character at a time. You can use your MyTsum's skill as many times as you can for every game! Here is how the Elsa and Rapunzel skills look like. They are by far my favourite because each clears 14 - 18 Tsum Tsums at a time, providing you a ton of points and coins. They don't even have to be the same characters since Elsa freezes the two bottom rows, allowing you to pop them all at once while Rapunzel lets you connect a series of Tsum Tsums regardless of their characters and pop them all at once as well.
And can we just talk about how AWESOME that Rapunzel background is when you use the skill? Ugh, the lanterns even float around and check out the Flynn and Punzie silhouette at the bottom. AWWWWW.... //feels
When you play, if you play fast enough you can hit the Fever Bonus! This is a bonus time that lasts for as long as the gauge at the bottom doesn't run out. During the Fever Bonus there is no combo time limit, scores are increased and you get additional time for your game! Now, as I mentioned combos - the higher your combo is throughout the game, the higher your score becomes. But be careful, a combo happens when you consecutively pop characters. If you slow down for even a second, the combo starts again from 1.
At the end of each game, you can get bonuses. Unpopped bubbles will be popped and MyTsums who's skill is ready to be activated will turn into a roulette. It will randomly select a character and pop all of its Tsum Tsums on the screen.
TIP 3: If you want to increase your score, focus on never missing a character to pop so your combo keeps going. But if you are aiming for gold, as I did when I first got the game, I make sure to try and make the longest connections per character because if you pop 4 or more tsums in one line, you get coins from them.
CONS: There is little I dislike about the game, except that:
1.) You can't really have much control on how you level your Tsum's skill. Like, I really want to increase Rapunzel's skill level by a lot but I can' until I randomly get her again on the Premium Box. So, levelling your Tsum's skill and getting the Tsum you want is really all dependant on pure luck.
2.) Since the game is powered by LINE, you can only play the game if you have internet connection. Now, I don't always have internet connection so I can never play the game as often as I want to (although, this is probably good because this keeps my obsession in check HAHA) But otherwise, I really adore this game. It makes me want to do more DIY's hehehe.
TAP TITANS
Moving on, here's a game that also interested me by the get-go! This was recommended to me by my boyfriend and honestly, my first thought when I saw the app on the playstore was: "Is that Cloud? lol." (As in Cloud from the Final Fantasy 7 franchise). However, this game didn't disappoint! It's a very simple game and a lot of fun and the graphics are really amazing in my opinion like all the characters are absolutely adorable - I want to draw them in my own style and in full detail and stuff, hehe.
Anyway, so that's how it looks like in the app store. Again, this is a free game. There are in-app purchases as well but I personally never found the need for them while playing the game. This game also doesn't need an internet connection to be played which is fabulous because I always play this in the car if it's traffic and I'm not asleep, haha.
When you open the app, this is how it looks like as you play. Now, it's very simple you simply tap to attack the monster but the rest of the game is explained as you play. There isn't really a tutorial at the beginning that explains everything before you play the game on your own. It teaches you while you go along with the game - and I like this, actually. It keeps you playing despite the simplicity of it.
When you first start, you don't have the other characters along your side - you can hire them later. In the centre, you can see your main hero (the one with the red scarf) and the monster you are currently fighting against. You see your Tap Damage, which is your damage as in the hero you play. The Hero Damage Per Second (DPS) is the damage that the heroes you hire do on each monster. They attack every second. Current DPS is the total Damage all your characters do for each monster. Under these stats, you can see the skills your main hero can do and you can play each skill for a period o time. These come in fairly handy.
There are plenty types of monsters you can battle against and each monster will drop a number of coins. The chest monsters in particular will drop A LOT of coins once you defeat them. The coins you earn will allow you to spend on levelling up characters, unlocking new skills and levelling these skills as well. Also, for every stage you will battle 9 monsters before fighting against a boss and once you clear a certain number of stages, the landscape will change saying you have unlocked a new area to fight more monsters.
TIP : When I first played, I made sure to spend the coins on my main hero at first because I depended on my tap damage to kill monsters and earn more coins. However, as the game progressed and I hired more heroes, I spent most of the coins on them as you can see the Hero DPS is much higher than my Tap Damage. This is because when you're not playing the game, even if you're not running it on the background of your phone applications, the heroes you hired will fight for you and earn you coins while you are away. You can collect these earned coins when you open your game again on the upper left screen as seen in the photo above.
In the bottom half of the screen, once you click on the taps of the bottom, a window will pull up. If you hit the first one, with the swords this will show you the level and skill about your main character. Here, you can level up your character which will result in increasing your Tap Damage. You can also purchase the skills you can use and level them up here, so long as you meet the requirements to be able to use that skill.
The skills can be used once you tap on them. In the photo above, I used the first skill you can unlock: Heavenly Strike. This allows you to cause great damage onto your opponent. My favourite skill is the sixth skill you can unlock (I took screen captions of the game before I unlocked this skill lol oops), it basically lets you earn coins for EVERY tap for a period of time. I get a lot of coins for this, it helps a bunch!
The second tab showcases everything about the heroes you hire. You can hire up to 30 heroes, I believe, and each deals a different amount of damage and comes with different skills once you level them up high enough and unlock these.
This is what I like most about the game. You get to plan out and really think abut which hero you want to level up most to unlock a specific skill that will really help in how you play the game. I personally go for skills like increasing gold drop amount (so I can earn more coins), skills that increase the respective hired hero's damage per second (so each hero is stronger), and Increase ALL damage by a percentage (so I can do both, earning more coins by defeating each monster by becoming stronger). Again, this is very important, at least in my opinion since these hired heroes play for you and defeat monsters while you are away.
TIP 2: I usually spend more on the newer heroes I get because they are stronger, which makes them kill more monsters - which earns me more gold. Once I level up my stronger heroes who deal more damage for each level, I level up the weaker heroes but mostly depending on the skill that would benefit the entire team more. Sometimes, I also get very neat-freaky and level up according to everyone getting to a certain level so it's all organised or stuff like that - hahahah.
TIP 3: When battling bosses, there is a time limit to defeat each boss. If it looks like I really can't win, which means the timer bar is decreasing quicker than the HP bar of the boss, I immediately leave the battle. This allows you to stay on the stage and fight endless monsters to level up and earn more gold. I do this because bosses can kill your hired heroes and when your hired hero dies, you have to wait 6+ hours until it revives or spend a lot of diamonds to revive them. What makes it worse is that, not only does your Hero DPS get decreased but all the skills under that hero will be temporarily halted as well. So if the hired hero that dies has the "Increase ALL damage by 30%" for example, your total DPS will be decreased by that 30% as well. It affects the entire team greatly.
The last two tabs hold the Artifices tab and the Privileges tab. Artifacts are special items that you can get to incase your stats greatly. However, these are obtained by spending Relics and Relics can be dropped by Bosses only sometimes. I am new to this, but this seems like a very exciting and useful upgrade. I hope I can get more Relics soon. As for the privileges, this is where you can spend your diamonds. Diamonds are obtained by completing achievements in the game such as reaching a certain stage, levelling up your heroes a number of times and even the number of monsters you kill. My favourite privilege and basically, the only one I use is the Make It Rain privilege which gifts you with a ton of gold you can spend. This costs a lot of diamonds but it's definitely worth it.
A really great thing about the accomplishments on this game is that there is SO MANY of them. For every accomplishment, there are five levels of it that you must clear which really prolongs the game and allows getting diamonds to not be too difficult. Of course, clearing each level only makes the next more difficult but this game is very fast paced and I promise, you'll be clearing of achievements before you even realise it. Be sure to keep an eye on the trophy icon on the upper left hand corner of your screen. If a small exclamation point appears, then you have just cleared an achievement. Click the icons and go and claim your reward!
PROBLEM: Sadly, I did face a problem while playing this game. In the game, you can get treasure chests dropped by fairies, they will give you a number of things: gold, diamonds, power ups for free, etc. One of their gifts are like what is shown above. They kind of go like "Watch this video/Click this ad to earn gold/earn diamonds/gold for every tap/etc." I don't know if it's just me, but when I click th Watch Video or Click Ads button, more often than not, nothing at all happens. Like, this has only worked for me like 5 - 7 times? But, I've been getting this countless times already. I get upset when it doesn't work because it really offers up SO MANY coins and diamonds but I can never get them huhuhu
CONS: The cons in this game is probably just out of personal preference:
1.) I know the game values on its simplicity of tapping to battle but I really just wish there was more of a diversity in battling such as battle strategy other than relying on stats to up your game. I generally look for this in a lot of fantasy-battle games, so it's just a personal opinion. I would love to see more battle strategy off of this game, since I like everything else so much.
2.) Maybe I just didn't see it but I want to know more about the monsters, like how much gold each drops or which boss would be most likely to kill which hero, etc. I'm sure there are guides online(???) but I think it would be a cool feature in the game as well to add more of a strategy aspect into this simple game.
But yeah, I really like how you don't need internet for this game and the levelling of the hired heroes. Those are the two things I really like the most, I think.
How about you? Do you play? If not, are you planning to play the games, or no? Which do you prefer?
I personally prefer Disney's Tsum Tsums over the Tap Titans. I can see myself playing it for a longer time (probably because I am the biggest Disney Dork). Like, as much as I enjoy Tap Titans to pass time, I'll probably delete it once I'm done with it. Although, I am very thankful for my boyfriend who introduced this to me!! But yeah, Tsum Tsums for life!! Hehehehe 'Till the next review!
