Home Features DJ Nights – A Rave on Your iPhone Courtesy of Clickgamer

DJ Nights – A Rave on Your iPhone Courtesy of Clickgamer

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The Tap Tap series once reigned supreme in the rhythm game genre on the iPhone, but recently it has seen some serious competition with EA Mobile’s Rock Band, and its supremacy is about to be challenged again when Clickgamer releases its DJ Nights: Global Tour title later this week. The game is developed by MusiGames (Drums Challenge), who is no stranger to the when it comes to the art of combining computers and music. AppAddict was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to try out this new finger tapper over the weekend and we are officially and completely hooked.

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DJ Nights’ musical focus is Electronic/House/Dance music and plays similarly to other games in the genre, but adds “record scratching”, “vibe mode” and a new game mechanic called “tap anywhere”. Notes will slide down one of the three paths in the center of the screen and when they pass over the bar at the bottom of the screen, you must tap to play them. Depending on your accuracy and timing, you are given a “perfect”, “good”, “bad”, or “miss” score for the note. Sometimes multiple notes need to be played at the same time, requiring two fingers to tap the screen simultaneously! DJ Nights does a great job of keeping your fingers moving with a variety of additional actions as well. Other notes will need to be tapped and held, or you may need to shake your device forward, or spin your finger to simulate scratching on one of the game’s two turntables. Finally there is “vibe mode” which players can periodically enable. During “vibe mode” all points earned will be multiplied, so it’s best to enable this during periods containing a large number of notes to really rack up a high score.

When we first heard about the “tap anywhere” game mechanic, we were a little concerned that this would dumb down gameplay, and it’d be like Tap Tap Revenge with training wheels. We are happy to report that right from our first playthrough, we quickly realized that this was not the case. In fact, tap anywhere really opens up the screen and enables players to see what’s going on, without their fingers getting in the way. It allows you to truly appreciate the game’s beautiful graphical elements. With the location requirement taken out of the equation, players can now focus solely on the rhythm. While we feel that the traditional game mechanisms work just fine, we found that the slight “simplification” offered by tap anywhere freed us up to focus more on the music and less on the actual note objects, allowing us to get into a real groove. Like one of the included songs exclaims “You Gotta Feel Free” and we certainly agree.

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In its initial release, DJ Nights : Global Tour will have 12 songs by top electronic artists from the leading electronic record label Black Hole Recordings. We’ll be the first to admit that we are not at all familiar with what’s hot in the electronic music scene, but the two songs we were able to try (more on this later) were fantastic! Navigate the globe, hopping from club to club to unlock and experience each song. Casual and Advanced difficultly levels, as well as OpenFeint achievements, and future free and paid DLC will keep you coming back for more. We are not sure if it was a limitation of the preview build we had, or just an inadequacy on our part, but we were unable to unlock more than just two of the songs. Having played this game for hours, constantly improving our scores, moving up the OpenFient leaderboards, we are inclined to say that it was the former. Either way, this showed us that Clickgamer needs to more clearly explain to the player, the criteria for unlocking new levels.

We had a blast with DJ Nights: Global Tour and look forward to trying out the rest of the songs as well. Although, our experience was not without a few minor hiccups. Besides the unlocking issue, we did experience an occasional graphical stutter, and the initial load time was 20+ seconds on our second gen iPod Touch. Like we said, these are minor issues that did not severely detract from our enjoyment of the games and we are hoping they will be fixed in either the final official release or a point update. At $2.99, DJ Nights : Global Tour falls smack in the middle of the price range for the genre. We definitely recommend checking this game out, both avid electronic music fans and casual listeners will love the game’s infectious beats and inviting tap anywhere control scheme. Your fingers will certainly get a workout!

Be sure to read our exclusive interview with DJ Nights’ developer MusiGames.