Mr.Farmville

Before Disney acquired Playdom for $563.2 million, it had also picked up one of the top mobile developers on the iPhone, Tapulous. Today, Disney Mobile is announcing its first addition to the Tap Tap Revenge franchise since Tapulous’ acquisition back in July, Katy Perry Revenge.

As this is not the first iteration of the Tap Tap series, Katy Perry Revenge is not, at its core, terribly different from any of the other Tapulous rhythm games. That said, it comes with a few added bonuses and minor changes to the basic game play. Whether or not these are worth the $5 price tag depends greatly on how much the player likes Katy Perry. Moreover, many of the added extras can also hinder game play, especially on higher difficulties.

For those unfamiliar with the Tap Tap Revenge franchise, it is best described as a mobile rendition of Guitar Hero. Players pick from a variety of songs and tap orbs in rhythm as they stream down a trio of vertical bars. Unlike the console counterpart, however, there is no audible penalty for missing (meaning no discordant sound is played, and that the song plays normally regardless), but the game does tells the user that they are tapping too early or too late. However, in this particular rendition, missing completely actually takes away points.

That’s really the whole point to all of the Tap Tap games — to score the highest score possible. Like the others, Katy Perry Revenge also has similar score multipliers for streaks, hitting highlighted notes in a sequence, and so on. In addition to this, the optional mechanic of tilting the iPhone at specific moments in the song is also included.

So what’s different? Well, most of the songs come with a handful of bright and highly saturated backgrounds and themes that look pretty good. Sadly, with 10 songs available at the moment (7 must be downloaded for free after the app is installed), most share these same themes.

Moving into game play, many songs come with the typical, straight bars in which the orbs travel down, but two of the four new backgrounds have twisted and zigzagging ones. In truth, this does add a bit more difficulty to the game as one really has to pay attention to the orbs coming down. Nevertheless, when played on hard or extreme difficulty, it becomes very dizzying, very quickly, and actually, successfully, dries out the eyes quite well. Granted, it is a greater challenge, but with about nine million notes and chords coming down the pipe on extreme, some people will like it; others will hate it.

The effects in some levels can be a bit bothersome as well. They look fine on lower levels of difficulty. On certain songs, however, such as I Kissed a Girl, on upper difficulties, they’re a big hindrance. With the particular song in question, the orbs burst into bubbles when tapped. On hard or extreme, this song has a tremendous number of chords streaming at a very fast rate. This means that all these bubbles actually obscure most of the orbs that are about to reach the bottom, making the game, unintentionally, much harder.

Moving on to the social elements of the game, the most noticeable is integration with Facebook Connect that allows users to post their scores to their Facebook feeds (an element added way back with Tap Tap Revenge 3). There is also a set of four chat rooms strictly tailored to Katy Perry fans, and the game also comes with news about the band, photos, bios, and even tour dates.

Those features are all new, while the social elements carried over from earlier Tap Tap titles include traditional leaderboards, a Tap Tap profile, and a direct challenge feature that sends challenges to friends on the Tap Tap network, or via email.

As was noted above, there are currently 10 songs available for Katy Perry Revenge and include the following:

• California Girls
• Circle The Drain
• Firework
• Hot N Cold
• I Kissed a Girl
• Last Friday Night
• One of The Boys
• Teenage Dream
• Thinking of You
• Waking Up In Vegas

It’s likely that Disney’s plan is to make further songs available in the future either via purchase or through in-game mechanics, and like past Tap Tap games, purchasable in iTunes as well. All the same, for $4.99, Katy Perry Revenge doesn’t really seem like a great value compared to past Tap Tap Revenge apps (many of which were free). For the most part, it’s pretty much more of the same, with a slight graphical face lift; as such, this seems more like a brand experiment by Disney to test out whether fans will pay significant amounts for artist-specific music apps.

Source: Inside Social Games