I have some friends who are into professional wrestling, but I’ve never been able to get into it myself.  I don’t have anything against professional wrestling, and I think the physical prowess of those athletes is amazing, but it’s just not my cup of tea.  But every now and then I’ll try watching or playing something related to wrestling to see what it is my friends like about the whole thing.  Recently SEGA released a downloadable endless clicker called WWE Tap Mania, so I decided to try that.  Of course, that might’ve been a mistake as I’m not a big fan of endless clickers either, but let’s see how it goes.  The game is available on iOS and Android devices, but reviewed on iPad here.

So the first thing you do is make a wrestler card.  I’m not sure if the one you choose is a customizable wrestler or an actual real life one, but I think it’s the former since they don’t have a name.  Then you just tap on the screen to ‘hit’ your opponent in the ring.  As you defeat opponents, you’ll earn cash which you can use to buy cards and add wrestlers to your team.  You can have up to five at once, and the more you have, the stronger your hits will be against your opponent (five against one hardly seems fair, though, but then, what do I know?).  You can also use cash to level up your team so they learn new skills and become stronger.  I should mention that the cards and wrestlers that you get are all real life people, like John Cena, Triple H, Sasha Banks, Randy Savage, and many others that I don’t know.

After you defeat about ten wrestlers or so, you’ll enter the Main Event which is like a boss fight.  Here you must defeat a wrestler in 30 seconds, so make sure your team is leveled up enough for the task.  You can tap on special skills for each team member for a special attack, so you’ll want to save them up for these fights as they take time to recharge.  If you don’t make it, you can always try again once you have enough money to level up your fighters.  Also, you gradually earn money when you’re not playing as well.  Once you defeat certain characters in Tap Mania, you can unlock them for play.  But first you have to buy them with in-game currency that’s even harder to earn than cash.  And that’s pretty much the whole game in a nutshell.

The game plays nearly exactly like another endless clicker I reviewed: Tap My Katamari.  But both are a bit different from the other one I wrote about a while back called Crazy Taxi: Gazillionaire.  While I did like the cartoony, stylized look of the characters (they would make for a great comic book or cartoon), the game didn’t hold my interest for very long.  But fans of WWE and endless clickers may still like it.

Kid Factor:

You do see cartoony characters perform punches, kicks, and other wrestling movies, but the animation is so choppy that the violence isn’t very graphic.  The announcers do spout “Oh my God” from time to time.  But if you’re OK with your kids watching professional wrestling, they’ll be OK with this game, too.  Reading skill is helpful for the text.  Parental supervision is recommended for the in-game ads and purchases.

Tags: Game Reviews, Television