Let's Tap Hands-On

For once it's nice to be able to play a game that uses a peripheral without having to actually go out and buy one to add to your growing living-room collection. All you need is a box for Let's Tap and you're all set to go. We've had a couple of opportunities to see the game already, but now we have a preview build in the office to tap on. Grabbing the closest box we could find, we stretched our fingers and jumped right in.

After an easy-to-follow tutorial, you eventually get the hang of how hard you should be tapping. You could simply bang on the box like you would a pair of bongos, but the best way to get results is to keep your fingers nimble. It's about having light fingers, unless you're playing on a really hard surface, in which case you'd need to hit harder for the Wii Remote to pick up your vibrations. The remote is placed facedown on a box or any equivalent surface, but you want something with a size that's manageable, so a tissue box or shoe box would work really well.

One of the first game types is Tap Runner, which is also one of our favorites, where you run through an obstacle course to beat your opponents. Up to four players can race against one another by tapping furiously to the finish line, leaping over hurdles and walking along tightropes. Tapping gently and quickly will get your gummy-like person to run, and a hard tap will make your gender-neutral gummy jump. It seems that if you can get a good groove going, you'll even get a boost in speed. There appear to be 16 different courses to unlock, but whether there will be more once you've discovered them all, we're not really sure.

Rhythm Tap is like Dance Dance Revolution, in which you'll tap to high-energy techno beats, indicated by scrolling green (light tap), blue (medium tap), and orange (hard tap) circles. They scroll from right to left, so you tap accordingly once they hit the tap point. Sometimes a green squiggly line will appear, which means you must hit the box repeatedly, and a multicolored squiggly indicates that you must tap with increasing strength. The songs we played with were all fast and upbeat, so you're going to need to tap with all the enthusiasm you can muster to make it through.

Silent Blocks is kind of like Jenga, in which the goal is to not have your tower keel over after you pluck out a block. There are a couple of modes within this game, Unlimited and Alchemist. Unlimited is played with as many players as you like, hotseat style, where you have a stack of blue and red pentagon-shaped tiles and you must take turns pulling one out by tapping until someone topples the tower. A cursor is constantly cycling through and highlighting each tile, so you must tap once to select which tile you want to remove, tap again to pick a direction that you want to pull it from, and then tap repeatedly to slide it out. You'll watch the entire tower wobble around as you do this, but as long as it stays standing, you're in the clear. The Alchemist mode--which can be played solo or multiplayer--is like a match-three mode, in which you pluck out tiles so that there are at least three of the same color stacked on top of each other. Once that happens, the tiles disappear to create a new color of tile, and more blue and red ones will drop to fill in the space.

The last game type (not including Visualizer, which we will get to later) is Bubble Voyager, in which you control a creature--which kind of looks like NiGHTS in a space suit--with a bubble-spewing jetpack in a side-scrolling environment. Each time you tap, your pack pumps out bubbles, giving your character a slight upward boost; otherwise you'll fall to the bottom of the screen where harmful lasers will immediately fire at you. You have to do some careful tapping to remain in the center of the screen, and you also have to avoid mines and asteroids and other obstacles. A hard tap will launch missiles, which can clear out some of the obstacles in your way. There's a multiplayer version in which you each control a battleship that continuously rotates, so you need to gently tap the box--also powered by bubbles--when your ship is facing the direction you want to go. Power-ups are available for you to pick up while dodging asteroids, so it's a bit of a hectic mode, but it's fun as well.

If you're looking to just tap without a particular goal in mind, the Visualizer mode lets you tap paint onto a blank canvas or light up the skies with fireworks. It's like messing around with an interactive screensaver, so you can even set it so that the environments change every 30 seconds or so. If you want a break from the bright and crazy Tron-like visuals, your eyeballs can take a breather while you tap ripples into a pond.

Let's Tap uses the Wii motion controls in a unique way with simple but artistic visuals that you don't find yourself getting hung up on. The gameplay modes are fun to play on your own, as well as with other people, so if you're looking for a simple game that everyone can get right into, keep an eye out for Let's Tap when it is released June 16.