I played Battleborn Tap as it came out and for quite a while. The periodic boss areas involved some strategy (I saved my supers for those if they were close). And of course, what you upgrade and how you handle prestige and which characters you use. So, it’s not a brainless game.
Battleborn Tap was mostly my first intro to this type of game. Even though the genre has been around about ~5 years or something.
I go back and forth on whether I like this type of game. I resent the absurdity of clicking/tapping the same button 10 to 30 times in a row or more, when the developer could just give you a shortcut for it (hold down the button, slider, etc…). And it’s odd that the game plays itself while I’m not there.
I played Battleborn Tap for a while. Then I noticed a couple other games on iOS that were a similar structure. Tap a lot to upgrade your stuff. It earns stuff even while you’re not playing. Prestige to reset your stuff for newgame+. Then I started to feel like I shouldn’t bother with those and instead focus on just the one, Battleborn Tap, which is also a little deeper, IMO, than most of these.
But since then I started playing some other stuff on my phone more and eventually I stopped playing BB Tap. I like the premise I guess, but the idea of redoing this cycle over and over and over and over, etc… starts to wear thin. Do I really want to keep resetting my progress just to see how much faster I can do it next time? When the core game mechanic is just, tap to upgrade your attack or defense of your 5 chars and use supers every few minutes? It got somewhat demanding of my attention. More than I wanted it to, I suppose.
If you throw stronger game mechanics into the cycle, I get interested. Because, take it far enough and you have something like Diablo 3 with seasons. Or Borderlands with at least Bad Ass Ranks enabled.
Anyhow, it was neat to learn that the genre has a name. It’s certainly better than the Farmville, Mafia Wars rut games were stuck in for a while. Later it was tower defense. Now we are starting to see a whole wave of digital ccgs that want to be hearthstone. But that turns me off too. Plants vs Zombies Heroes is a great digital ccg. Currently play that a lot.
Oh. But an example of another possible wave of cloneware is Animation Throwdown. It’s barely a ccg. It’s definitely a grind. It seems semi-aware of this and provides some ways to autoplay your battles and speed increasers to the game. A few steps further and it could be an incremental game. But I think it is a clone of something else and not that much fun as a game. Not how it’s structured anyhow. If it wasn’t structured as a freemium game, it might have been a good game. Instead it’s a freemium card collecting grindfest. And yet, it seems to be played quite a bit and making a lot I suspect. So expect more clones of it. Yay…
Anyhow. BB Tap. Fun but I’m not sure it’s for me anymore.
