Tapping is an integral part of professional wrestling, but it’s done when you want to give up. Sega and The Tap Lab want you to do exactly the opposite in WWE Tap Mania, a colorful idle clicker that is perfect …
Tapping is an integral part of professional wrestling, but it’s done when you want to give up. Sega and The Tap Lab want you to do exactly the opposite in WWE Tap Mania, a colorful idle clicker that is perfect if you’re a WWE fan and a casual mobile gamer but a little less enticing for everyone else.
The set-up is appropriately simple: you’re an up and coming grappler trying to turn enough heads to become a legitimate WWE Superstar. Working your way to the top means tapping as fast as possible to defeat other hopefuls and even proving yourself against established talent from the WWE’s past and present.
You don’t have to go it alone, though. Like many other idle clickers of this ilk, Tap Mania gives you a team of up to four WWE performers who will help you do battle by automatically attacking every so often and pulling off special moves you can activate at regular intervals with just a single tap. Those come in handy during the Main Event of each stage, which comes after you’ve defeated 10 normal wrestlers.
There’s a more intricate strategic element than you might expect here, since the wrestlers have their own types and unlockable perks, and it’s likely that people who really dive into the numbers can figure out some cool ways to maximize teams for specific bosses. You can and probably will just brute force your way through a lot of the gameplay, though, which is just fine for an idle clicker.
The biggest thing is to stay ahead of the curve by using the quickly obscene amounts of cash earned in the ring to continually power up the members of your team so they do more damage and learn additional skills. Your wrestlers also earn cash when you are logged out of the game, so a good way to level them up enough to beat a particularly difficult Main Event is just to let the game be for about 12 hours and power up your team with the dough earned while you were gone. That’s also pretty standard stuff for this genre.
Where WWE Tap Mania stands out a little more from similar titles is in its presentation.The developers have given the game a unique visual feel with wrestlers that are highly stylized and instantly recognizable, with a larger than life presence that suits the overall atmosphere. WWE Superstars are already the closest thing we have to real life superheroes in certain respects, and Tap Mania makes them look and sound that way as well.
So the question isn’t whether this is a good idle clicker, because it definitely is. Instead, the real dilemma is whether Tap Mania can attract people who wouldn’t normally enjoy a tap-fest like this, and the answer is … well, maybe? No one should ever underestimate the drawing power of the WWE brand, but there are plenty of other mobile games out there featuring the same current stars and legends, which is kind of the downside of the WWE’s mobile strategy in general. There’s a game out there for everyone, but not the same game for all.
Tap Mania has its place in that overall scheme, as it’s the one that you can take out, play for a few minutes while tapping furiously and then switch off until you check in before bed — or maybe during commercial breaks in Raw or SmackDown, which would make WWE execs smile. There’s gold in them taps, but maybe not in the long term for everyone.
