Tap Wizard 2 | Review

Tap Wizard was quite a hit of a mobile title a while back, providing idle game fans with a pretty elaborate and involved experience. It’s sequel time, and for the occasion, PC and consoles join in on the fun. Let’s check out the free-to-play Tap Wizard 2 on Xbox, shall we?

Evolving Feelings

It is certainly weird to see a game’s title specifically referring to tapping, as in putting your finger on a touch screen, as the Xbox consoles support no such thing. Yet, Tap Wizard 2 exists on Xbox, and it was studied to be played on a controller. On paper, this is an easy proposition: as the game’s very splash screen immediately suggests, the playable character is moved with the right stick, while the cursor to navigate everything else is on the left stick. As is customary for idle games, moving isn’t even mandatory, with the game automatically managing traversal and attacks when not pressing anything. Even the aggressivity in the movement patterns can be customized when the AI manages it, allowing players to truly automate most processes, even putting various unlocks on auto-claim. Certainly a particularly idle kind of an idle game!

This controller implementation is a smart idea, but the execution is questionable. Having to navigate between several menus and sub-menus on a slow cursor is much less comfortable than, say, hopping around with the D-pad. I scrolled through the settings menu countless times, and maybe I’m blind, but I did not find a way to make this cursor go any faster. The game also constantly wants the player’s attention, with things to level up, new unlocks and more to attend to, which is always a pretty slow and laborious process. In a weird design quirk, most icons are on grid formations, and each icon can be dragged and reordered as you please, even inside folders (or bags, in this case).

This initially made me accidentally grab and move things rather often, but I ended up liking said facet of the game, which is ultimately more customizable than most things on consoles. And indeed, my general opinions about the game were quite the rollercoaster.

Sitting Behind the Window

The game’s minimalistic pixel art style gets the job done, though this also translates to rather confusing icons and somewhat ugly menus and grids. This wouldn’t be such a huge issue if said windows didn’t constantly cover up the action. You see, every time you open up a menu on the screen, this ends up right in front of the action, covering up all the semi-automated combat underneath. With various windows opening up further windows, you could easily have like three different screens covering up the action, with then the slow cursor needing to be carried all the way to the X button in their corner to be closed.

This is so very obviously a game designed to be played with a touch screen or a mouse, and the developers haven’t found good solutions for a gamepad it seems. In this state, while the game on paper features more depth, it feels like a huge step backward from the much simpler yet more intuitive and better-controlling mobile prequel. Some windows can be reduced in size, but not moved, thus the problem isn’t exactly solved, though at least the right stick movement still works underneath it all.

Tap Wizard 2’s minimalistic pixel art design, as said, has its toll on the readability of the menus as well, and this has to do with the very icons too. While plenty of them are understandable enough, representing tomes, an ascending hero and so forth, many of them are also a bit hard to decipher on the drawing alone, forcing the player to hover over the icon, wait for the explanation text to pop up and read that. Again, with the aforementioned slow cursor. It’s an idle game, and it’s meant to be a timewaster, but not like this. There are even tons of lore entries getting unlocked, one every handful of minutes. There’s also no pause button, which may feel odd, but in an idle game every moment is good for it to grind for you. More annoyingly, the settings menu is also hidden in the game’s uncomfortable windows, so even finding something as trivial as where to change the visual indicators can take longer than needed.

Oddly enough, by default, the game doesn’t display damage numbers, enemy HPs and such – it helps with visual clutter, but since idle games tend to be “Watch Number Go Up: The Game”, it’s highly unusual that this is not a focus by default. Leaving such visual cues off makes the action feel aimless, and I suggest turning them on to understand how much you are actually becoming stronger by unlocking certain things. There are even several options that do nothing on Xbox, such as turning on or off the custom cursors or full screen – this ain’t Windows, and the port clearly was a bit rushed in this aspect.

Death After Death, I Mean, Rewind After Rewind

Most idle games have a pretty simple formula. The player progresses through a power creep of sorts, with even bonuses applied when not playing. Eventually, progress becomes virtually impossible due to the extreme difficulty, at which point the player has to start the game again with extra stat boosts, allowing them to quickly grind back up to where they were and be able to push just a little bit farther, before yet another reset. Tap Wizard 2 follows the same basic idea, but there’s a bizarre catch: the player’s hero dies. Well, technically the wizard we control rewinds time, but as far as practicality goes, it’s a 0HP situation. This happens constantly, every one to three minutes usually, followed by the couple seconds long “death” animation where the game zooms in on our character. It’s partially skippable, but even then, it takes a handful of seconds only to rewatch this again another 2 or 3 minutes later anyway.

It tends to boil down to this: you start mowing enemies for a few levels, which will take you less than a minute each. After only a couple levels, the difficulty will ramp up, and the player will inevitably perish. The game generously puts them back only 2 to 6 (depending on the context) levels behind, so it only takes a couple minutes tops to climb back to where we were. But then the rebirth’s perks were something rather small, like a 10% damage boost, so the progress made in this new life is maybe an extra level. Then another death, then maybe a life where the game’s randomness causes an earlier death even. Then it’s time to climb up again, only to die a level or two later.

Despite the non-stop action, it feels like glacial pacing. With 30 virtually identical levels to get through, and the difficulty going incrementally upwards, it never feels like there’s meaningful progress made. That’s it, until the ascension – sort of, anyway. But more on that later.

The Idle Motions

It’s a shame, because Tap Wizard 2 has its moments. Namely, when you’re manually navigating your hero in the small arenas, having to dodge countless enemies and attacks – these moments, with the auto-attacking patterns, remind me of bullet heaven games like Vampire Survivors. But these moments of satisfaction are short-lived, as suffering through a challenging segment means little, as the level after will likely be too difficult – and thus, the death cycle begins anew. The biggest dopamine rush is when the player collects enough runes to stack a lot of temporary effects, increasing their attack, health regeneration, speed and more, making for faster progression. But once these short-lived powers wear off, it’s back to the frustratingly slow progress, crashing against a giant horde of ranged attacks or a particularly HP-heavy boss.

Rerunning through the same stages on and on, knowing fully well where the limit will be, can be a bit annoying, with a lot of the unlock times eventually turning to several hours of idling or a couple hours of active sessions. The game does eventually open up by offering more choice of skills, permanent upgrades, a larger selection of runes, totems and whatnot. In fairness, this makes the game more fun, but a lot of its core issues are not quite solved even after many hours. And it takes well over a dozen hours to get to a point where the game’s potential starts shining through.

Of course, this being an idle game, means there’s all sorts of other things to keep an eye on – almost too many of them, in fact. Every once in a while, players can enhance their character, which sends them back to level 1, though in a new area and with massive boosts to unlock from a giant skill tree. There are new weapons to unlock, perks becoming available for each, research to maximize your effectiveness. One cool aspect is that each ascension brings you back to the character selection screen, allowing the player to start with a different wizard and use new spells. Not that there’s a significant difference in this semi-automated combat system, but it feels nice to have that choice again and again.

To the game’s credit, it keeps unlocking new mechanics, content and goals. If only it were all well explained and satisfying – most of it boils down to the game giving you 3 dots on a red square next to an icon, which means the unlock is now ready to get. That’s it, that’s essentially the gameplay – wait for the red notification, click on it. Ironically, this can even be automated eventually, taking even that little agency from the players. Again, not quite unusual for an idle game, but with the game’s default settings offering so little feedback on how the player is actually fighting, this is one of those games that only really starts being enjoyable once a lot of the content opens up, and the player customizes the experience in more ways than one.

Do I Want to Waste Time? Maybe

With suboptimal controls, clunky menus covering up the action and very questionable pacing, going through the idle game motions in Tap Wizard 2 is not that great of a time at first. It does eventually open up with further unlocks and tons of customization, but the time it takes to really get going is probably too high for most players to bother. Even it being free-to-play makes it hard to recommend when, on Xbox alone, you can play the likes of Idle Champions or Clicker Heroes for free: games with more engaging hooks, more immediate satisfactions and controls better suited for consoles.

I’m the kind of person who can sit in front of an idle game for hours, as I multitask something else like writing reviews or watching a TV show. Yet, Tap Wizard 2’s bizarre game design initially made me want to log off after a couple minutes at a time, and I really had to force myself to sit through various ascensions and countless deaths just to see if something more exciting came along. Eventually, the game evolved to a point that I could say I was having a decent amount of fun. But unless you’re a hardcore idle game fan and need a fix, you can likely this one out, as the first 10-20 hours of this game are easily the least enjoyable part of an otherwise quite okay game.

Tap Wizard 2

Played on

Xbox Series X

PROS

• Virtually unending content
• Hints of bullet heaven-like chaos
• The game opens up more and more with time

CONS

• Terribly slow virtual cursor on a controller
• Clunky menus covering up the action
• Dreadful first hours
• Very slow progression, even for idle game standards