I was ready to sing the praises of PixelTap for being a Telegram-based tap-to-earn game that was trying to do something different. But amid recent changes, one new feature in the Pixelverse game has killed any chance of me continuing to play.
Compared to other prominent tap-to-earn games, PixelTap is more involved than just blindly tapping the screen, as you are thrown into battles against other players and have to tap in specific areas of the screen to take them down.
When you get matched against a similar-level opponent that isn’t using some kind of auto-clicker to gain an advantage, the fights are surprisingly fun and a close match can be very tense indeed. That’s especially true if it comes down to the last few frantic moments when your fingers start to feel tired.
The superkick system, which sees you pick one corner of the screen to attack and one to defend, can derail a close fight with super-powered damage, but this tends to be somewhat of a rarity—so close fights are more common than you might think when first starting out.
Upgrading your pets isn’t a particularly satisfying experience, as it’s really just a process of tapping buttons on the menu, but taking them into battle and crushing others is—and it will slowly start to make you care a little about the pets in your stable.
As far as tap-to-earn games go, this is probably the closest to an actual game that I’ve played. With some UI and visual improvements to the battle system, PixelTap could become really quite fun to play for a while.
‘Pixelverse’ Reveals Telegram Game Airdrop and TON L2 Plans as PIXFI Launches
Pixelverse, a crypto gaming franchise that has rapidly gained recent prominence in part due to the success of its PixelTap game on Telegram, launched its PIXFI token on Thursday—and revealed plans for rewarding players with an airdrop. PIXFI is currently trading at a price of around $0.024, as of this writing, though price trackers vary on whether it’s up or down since launch due to the extreme volatility of newly launched tokens. CoinGecko calls it up 17% so far, while CoinMarketCap frames it a...
But there are things that hold it back, with an unbalanced economy being one of them. Simply solving the daily combo every day will net you more coins than hours of battles—like 10 million or more once you’ve been playing for a while. That makes it essentially pointless to play the lower-reward battles, if all you really care about is getting a bigger balance.
Then there’s the passive income, which you can claim in one batch by tapping a button, or get it gradually by tapping the screen. Why you would do the latter, I don’t understand, as you can just log in once every few hours to click a button and maximize your earnings.
But these confusing choices are nothing compared to the recently implemented level system. With fans calling for some kind of progression that wasn’t tied to a pet, Pixelverse added account levels earlier this month, giving you tasks to complete that will increase your level and thus your earning potential.
Early tasks like winning a set amount of battles or earning a certain amount of coins were reasonable enough. But to progress past level three, you have to invite one friend to the game and follow the game’s Twitter (aka X) account—two things I’m not really prepared to do in order to level up.
And higher levels only ask for more friend referrals, echoing one of the most frustrating parts of other Telegram games like Hamster Kombat. PixelTap prioritizes growth over player experience, but that’s the name of the game with these Telegram games—it’s all about engagement and scale.
‘Hamster Kombat’ Airdrop Delayed as Pre-Market Trading for Telegram Game Expands
Viral Telegram-based tap-to-earn game Hamster Kombat planned to launch its token on The Open Network (TON) in July, but with two days left before the end of the month, the team says it is still working out a plan to deploy the large-scale airdrop. The Hamster Kombat website still notes a July target for the token generation event (TGE), but on Monday, the developers shared a lengthy tweet that suggests that we’re unlikely to see a token debut in the next two days before the month ends. “We are a...
Having optional bonuses for these actions is fine, because I can ignore them and not annoy my friends and fill my social feeds with things like this. But as soon as you lock progression behind those actions, that’s a signal for me to stop playing.
I’m disappointed by the move, as PixelTap was perhaps the most satisfying of all the tap-to-earn games I’ve played so far. But as I’m not willing to annoy my friends with such requests, I’m stuck and unable to progress—so I doubt I’ll ever go back, even if there are crypto rewards up for grabs.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
