Tamago Monsters Returns review: ready to tap your screen 1,000 times a minute?

Tamago Monsters Returns (TMR), developed in Korea by Mamagom and published by Smartstudy, is a free-to-play sequel to Tamago Monsters, and a game that confused me for the first 15 minutes I spent playing it.

Concept

Tamago is a Japanese word for ‘egg’, and the premise of the game is that you have to free monsters from their eggshell enslavements so that they may join your ranks and battle with you against evil monsters.

It sounds really simple, but because this game is missing even a basic tutorial or introduction, I had to figure it all out on my own by randomly touching everything in sight. This is a problem because TMR isn’t as simple a game as Flappy Bird or even Megaman, two examples of games that can afford to let players learn via trial and error.

Gameplay

While the lack of a tutorial is a problem with the game, the real issue at hand is the “gameplay”. TMR is a game with a stamina system and you spend turns adventuring in a forest, or heaven, or other locales crawling with monsters, triggering random events. These events include gaining food to feed your monsters with, gaining money used to buy equipment, and finding eggs that need to be hatched in order to unlock monsters, and it is the means by which you hatch these eggs that really does this game in.

(See: If you put a stamina system in your game I hate you)

Apparently, tapping your screen repeatedly is developer Mamagom’s idea of a good time. Each time you tap the screen, the shell imprisoning some poor monster weakens, and once you have tapped the screen a sufficient number of times, the monster will be freed and will be yours to command. How many screen taps is enough, you ask? Most of the time, it’s 300. Fortunately you can use multiple fingers at once, though I could only get a maximum of six fingers tapping at the same time because I have big ham hands. It’s still flat out not fun at all, though.

If this was a rare occurrence, it wouldn’t really bother me, but you will basically have to do this every time you find an egg, which is really often. Also, as if that wasn’t punishment enough, a rare egg with another egg inside will appear occasionally. It’s like one of those Russian Matryoshka dolls with another doll inside, but in this case it’s an egg of pain containing an inner egg of despair. The rarer eggs take a whopping total of 1,000 screen taps to crack open, and if you put in all that effort and get a repeat of a monster you got before, you get no sympathy from me because I am pretty much warning you that this game is the stuff of screen warranty voids.

The more you tap, the more you level up, and once you hit level ten (will you?) you get to take your monsters into battle in the dungeon. You can feed your monsters to help them grow bigger and stronger, so they can more damage per hit to enemies. Note that monster levels are completely separate from your level, which may be confusing for new players because your level indicator is directly underneath your monster’s character portrait.

I really have no idea how this ball of slime just slashed me with three razor-sharp claws.