Let's Tap
Sega
Prope
Wii
US Release: TBC
UK Release: TBC
Screenshot Gallery

Where other developers look at the Wii Remote and see the potential for exaggerated gesture, forcing players into ever-more convoluted relationships with their sensor bar and living room apparatus, Prope sees the chance to minimise the strain of input, and build a game controlled by a single finger.

It only seems like a strange decision before you try it. After Let’s Tap, everything else seems a bit flabby.

Several cardboard surfaces are provided on which to place the Remote (though any surface will work to a degree), and tapping near the Remote’s ‘head’ does everything from navigating through the pre-game menus to sprinting past traps and rocketing over asteroids.

Depending on the minigame it detects either the rhythm of your tapping or the strength – and usually both, though extreme delicacy of touch is a prerequisite for high scores rather than general response.

Let’s Tap is composed of five smaller games, one of which is endless while the others are subdivided into stages. Tap Runner is the most recognisably ‘gamey’ of these, a four-man race in which a light, steady rhythm makes your avatar run, while a harder tap jumps. Lose the rhythm and you’ll trip up, get too excited and you’ll jump on the spot, but regular drumming maintains a steady pace with the odd speed boost.

There are plenty of courses, and the complexity increases with boosters, jumps, tightropes and barriers, but it never feels like the controls are asked to perform actions they’re incapable of.
This goes for Let’s Tap as a whole. Its achievement lies in making what might have been seen as a gimmick – control with a single finger – an intuitive control scheme that is never found wanting.
 
It’s at its most obvious in Rhythm Tap, a beat-matching exercise set to a number of quite brilliant J-pop tracks that in multiplayer layers each player’s tapping into the whole. But even in Bubble Voyager, a variant of Balloon Kid, the occasional hairy moment never feels like it would be any easier with traditional controls.

The remaining two games are more difficult to quantify. Silent Blocks presents a tower formed from slices that can be pulled out individually through an elegant interface that demands the most careful control of any of the games, causing the whole to tremble but turning matched blocks of the same
colour into smaller units of a different colour.

The similarity to Jenga’s trembling edifices is obvious, down to the fact that it’s a little sedate in singleplayer but never less than fiercely compulsive with friends. Visualiser is what it suggests, and not strictly a game at all. It does, however, include five different flavours of visual effect and morphs your tapping into identifiable elements on each of its settings, meaning any temptation to dismiss it comes up against the fact that a five-minute go always turns into a 20-minute tapathon.

And how many other visualisers could you say that about? Let’s Tap isn’t merely innovative, it’s an original concept applied over five distinct types of game that works extremely well. Bubble Voyager feels a little slight, and there will be those who grumble about Visualiser being counted as a game mode at all, but taken as a whole Let’s Tap offers a multiplayer experience that’s fresh, rewarding, and open to anyone who can tap a surface. Who knows? It might even tempt granny away from the bowling.

8/10