DJ Nights: Global Tour, a new tap-to-the-music game from Clickgamer, will be hitting the app store very soon. We were given a preview build, of which we are experiencing mixed emotions.
From the Tap Tap series to Guitar Rock Tour to Rock Band itself, the music tapping genre is filling up fast with plenty of offerings for the iDevice. Clickgamer is set to get in on the fun with DJ Nights, which boasts a dozen terrific songs from the techno/rave/dance scene. Featuring artists such as Emilio Fernandez, Existone, and Tom Cloud, you’ll travel to clubs around the world, as you drop the beat and attempt to keep up with the streaming notes. There are two difficulty levels for each song/location: Casual and Advanced. As with the other games in this genre, notes flow toward you, three-wide at times. DJ Nights takes some interesting liberties with what we’ve come to expect from these games, however. Whereas all of the other offerings require you to tap a certain location when the notes line up with the targets, DJ Nights simply asks that you tap anywhere on the screen. Use one finger for single notes, two for doubles, and three for triples. No more excuses that you missed the note because your finger was off the mark. Anywhere will do. If a full yellow bar streams toward you, shake the device when it hits its mark. This can be a bit awkward, as it breaks your visual concentration. This is the part of the game that we most often missed the notes. Personally, we are not fond of gameplay mechanics that require us to shake the device. Unlike the competition, there are turntables at the bottom of the screen, as well. When a curved arrow lines up with the turntable, drag your finger (“scratch”) anywhere on the screen to score points. If you notice a VIBE symbol appear on the screen, tap it and you’ll score double points for a short time. And, of course, any note with a tail must be held until the tail runs out. Miss notes and the music drops out. Keep up and you’ll be grooving all night long.
The graphics are terrific, with a clean interface and great neon themes. The controls are pretty good and the music is entrancing, offering a much different vibe than the mainstream tunes we are used to playing on these games. However, there are some things that don’t work so well. DJ Nights gives visual clues as to your success with hitting the notes. After each note passes, its lane will indicate Perfect, Good, Bad, or Miss. Perfect scores the most points, and Miss scores none. Anything other than miss keeps the streak tally rising, greatly increasing your score. One issue we had was that during notes with tails, the words in the lanes were obscured, making it difficult to tell if you were Perfect, Good, or whatever. Also, as we are able to tap anywhere, sometimes our fingers obscured the VIBE symbol, costing us points. The VIBE symbol is also nowhere near the center of the screen, where we are focusing our concentration. It is easy to overlook in the corner near the pause button, which was occasionally tapped by mistake, throwing us off our game and ruining a few good streaks. As this was a preview build, we only unlocked one other venue other than the default. It was unclear whether that was all that was available to us or if we simply had not met some unknown goal to unlock the next. A better explanation of what needs to be done to move forward would be useful.
Leaderboards are maintained through OpenFeint, so you can see who spins the 1’s and 2’s the best. There is an interactive tutorial to help you become acclimated to the control scheme, which was helpful. Replay value is good, as the music doesn’t really get old and there is always room for improvement of your score. Clickgamer plans to release DJ Nights: Global Tour for $2.99, a surprisingly competitive price for a pretty high-quality game. As there appear to be issues that require tweaking, DJ Nights: Global Tour is only able to rack up a 4-Dimple score, though some key updates, and additional tracks, could easily bump it higher.
