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.

Combat is done the same way as monster egg hatching—yep, more screen tapping. Boss monsters hit you at regular time intervals, so being able to tap faster is an advantage in battle, but a long-term disadvantage to your finger joints.

As you level up, you can also buy new equipment, which affects how many times you have to tap your screen for eggs to hatch. I was able to buy an item that basically cuts down the number of taps I have to perform by half, but the next stage I played had eggs that took twice as many taps to hatch. It’s like going shopping with a 50 per cent discount coupon, only to find that they doubled the price of every item in the store.

Perhaps the most ‘WTF’ moment I had playing this game, nay, had playing any game this year, is the creative approach TMR took to displaying ads. When you encounter a monster egg when adventuring, the screen will typically display the words ‘Egg found’ in big, bold, purple font. However, there was once where the game displayed the text ‘Ad found’ in the exact same font and style as the previous message, before displaying an ad for another game. I was actually stunned for a minute and had no idea how to process the most creative in-game ad ever presented to me. I still have no idea if this form of advertising is the most idiotic or most brilliant thing ever.

No.

Graphics

If there is anything redeeming about TMR, it’s the graphics. The art is colorful and really pops out at you, and while the monster designs are not Pokemon-tier, they’re still pretty cute and I can see little kids really getting into it.

Heck, I decided to download this game and give it a shot because at least the art looked above decent in all the screenshots, so at the very least Mamagom made a visually appealing game.

Conclusion

I get the feeling that this game is targeted at little kids who love collecting monsters, and don’t mind the monotony of repeatedly tapping the phone screen. Wise parents may want to invest in a screen protector for their mobile phones as I get the feeling that our phones are not hardy enough to withstand the kind of mindless, hard-hitting mashing this game requires.

However, given the fact that Mamagom’s target audience is children, a smart move would have been the inclusion of a tutorial, because this game is more complex than it looks. Instead of repeated screen tapping as a gimmick, it may have also been better to go for a slower, more rhythm-based tapping system, which is not only easier on the hardware, but also slightly more fun.

I do think that this game has the potential to be a hit with certain audiences, and if there is ever a sequel titled Tamago Monsters Return Again or something similar, I hope they will put more effort into the main selling point of any game: the gameplay.

Tamago Monsters Returns is currently available for free on Google Play.