Casual Game Piano Tiles Reviewed

In today's post we're going to talk about something completely different. We are going to review another casual game to see if we can learn something to improve our game. The casual game that is going to be reviewed is called "Piano Tiles".

When launching the game you immediately get this screen below:

The main screen is my least favorite part of the whole game. In my opinion the player gets too many options to choose from but has no idea what any of them mean. After playing some of them however, the names start to make sense. Since we are playing a piano game, the black and white color scheme is straightforward.

Onto the gameplay, which immediately starts after selecting one of  the eight highest buttons on the main screen. The game screen looks like this:

A simple screen that clearly indicates you need to tap the black rectangles. Once you tap, the game starts running and tiles appear from top to bottom. The yellow rectangles with red text are aesthetically ugly, but clearly get the attention from the player to inform him what he must do. 

So the game starts and almost immediately I tap on a white tile, which means I died and the "game over" screen comes up.

You see from the first image that the miss-tapped tile is highlighted red and a red game over screen to indicate you failed. This screenshot was taken in classic mode, where you need to reach a certain point, so no scores were shown. The screen is simple: choose to play again or exit to the main menu. Also a rate button is located on every screen to increase virality of the game.

After a few tries I managed to complete classic mode and as you might have guessed, the screen is green then.

The "win" screen shows you how fast you completed the level and also shows your best score in this gamemode. This way they encourage you to keep playing to beat your highscores. As you can see it only took me 13 seconds, So if you have a few minutes to spare you can easily start and play a few games which is the main goal of casual games.

In conclusion, this game was a pretty fun and decent casual game. It has a fast play style, an increasing difficulty and a variety of game modes. It immediately got me hooked to reach higher and faster scores. The learning curve was very low, just tap a tile, nothing more nothing less. A clear indication that you need to beat your time or  number of tiles tapped. 

The most important thing we learn from this, is that the game needs to be simple. Just a few  taps and you are on your way. Highscores are an important factor to keep players hooked and also the possibility to rate your game is something to consider for our own game. Keeping this in mind we'll continue to improve our game.