Porting web games to iOS devices is big business these days, and it seems like every addicting title is getting such treatment. Enter Tap the Frog, which is based on the popular Flash game, Click the Frog. It requires player to tap on frogs as quickly as they possibly can. While it’s certainly cute and enjoyable, the game is also fairly disposable and doesn’t really hold any lasting appeal.
Porting web games to iOS devices is big business these days, and it seems like every addicting title is getting such treatment. Enter Tap the Frog, which is based on the popular Flash game, Click the Frog. It requires player to tap on frogs as quickly as they possibly can. While it’s certainly cute and enjoyable, the game is also fairly disposable and doesn’t really hold any lasting appeal.
There’s no real story to this game; instead it’s just a series of mini-games based around the premise of tapping the screen as quickly as possible. These games never really last more than thirty seconds or so, but there are a reasonable number of them to choose from, and they’re all different enough from one another that they never feel overly repetitive.
Currently, there are sixteen different games available for play, though Playfo is promising that more are coming. At their core they rely on players mashing the iPhone/iPad’s screen as fast as possible in order to earn star rankings (five stars are available per level, but getting that fifth one is pretty much impossible to do because of the speed requirement). However, each mode requires players to mash differently. A couple of examples include how one mode requires players to tap frogs in a specific order, another simply asks that as many frogs as possible get tapped within the time limit, and yet another requires players to tap on a car in order to get it to move towards a finish line.
While it takes a bit of time and practice to get five stars on the various levels, it is possible (though still difficult) to do so. But, once the stars are all unlocked, there’s not really a lot of reason to go back and replay the game any more.
At first glance, it seems like Tap the Frog would be particularly kid-friendly, but the seven-year-old I gave my iPhone to got bored with the game fairly quickly; handing it back to me after about five minutes of play.
The game’s graphics are fairly simple, but they’re also pretty charming. The 2D frogs that pop up on the screen are simply-rendered, but brightly-colored and adorable at the same time. It bears noting that there are a lot of different frog models in the game, thanks to color and small detail variations.
Tap the Frog is one of those games where it feels like there’s something missing, but it’s hard to figure out what that is. It’s not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but its appeal doesn’t really last for more than about ten minutes at a time.
