Adding to its hugely successful series of Tap Tap Revenge rhythm tapping games, Tapulous has recently released Lady Gaga Revenge ($5), featuring the music and visuals of pop musician Lady Gaga. As with every prior paid version of Tap Tap, the newest one makes iterative improvements to the prior formula, and though we weren’t as impressed with this game as with Tap Tap Coldplay, fans of Lady Gaga will enjoy the music and the legitimately challenging tapping action.
Once again, Lady Gaga Revenge’s gameplay is simple: you need to tap along to the beats of songs. Three lines run north and south on the screen, each carrying beats that are supposed to be tapped at the second they reach a horizontal gap near the screen’s bottom. To break up the tapping, you’ll sometimes need to directionally shake the iPod touch or iPhone to several beats indicated by arrows, or do a general shake to activate a “Revenge” mode that increases your score.
The challenges come in juggling the tapping, shaking, and occasional holding down on a beat for a second or two.
What Lady Gaga Revenge adds to the prior formula is a new type of boss stage: for the first time in the Tap Tap Revenge series, you now flip the iPhone or iPod touch onto its side for a widescreen mode before the stage starts, and the number of lines increases from three to four. Notably, Gaga is actually a little more challenging than past titles even on Easy, so the addition of the fourth rail does in fact make the game just that much more difficult than before, especially as the difficulty levels increase.
Boss stages are only unlocked when you’ve completed a number of three-rail songs that vary in number and names between the four difficulty levels.
A two-player simultaneous mode is restricted to the three-rail stages, and once again played on a split screen.
It’s a pity that Lady Gaga Revenge’s graphics don’t take full advantage of either the new wide format or the prior portrait orientation levels. Past titles from Tapulous were a fairly continuous evolution into better and cooler main stages and boss levels, with Tap Tap Coldplay truly breaking a barrier with both its visuals and its music. By comparison, the Lady Gaga main stages are very nicely drawn, with blue- and black-heavy art that features curvy forced-perspective road-like lines, glowing gems and pucks, and even a cityscape that occasionally pulses; the art is all crisply detailed and very nicely stylized. Unfortunately, the overall level of animation and intensity is less impressive in the main stages than was Coldplay’s—a flat photo of Lady Gaga appears on every stage, for instance, but doesn’t animate—and downright boring in the boss levels, a return to Tap Tap Revenge 2 and pre-Coldplay form.
