I actually gave up on the time travel event halfway through and deleted the Tapped Out app. The whole "push the player to buy premium characters" aspect of the game felt like it had reached its worst, with everything took way too long for me to be able unlock most of the prizes thanks to the searching for fossils gameplay, and pretty much every character you could unlock without spending money was boring and uninteresting. Around the second act, I realized that everything was becoming a chore and wondered to myself why I was still playing this game, and just gave up.
But I got bored and downloaded the app again to try out this new update. And while it looks like the developers are still pushing the "give the players least interesting characters to unlock and the most interesting ones are premium" agenda (I mean really, Bleeding Gums is premium but the ones you can unlock for free are the rival band from Covercraft...who even remembers those characters?), at least the band gameplay is more interesting and much more easier to unlock stuff then in the time travel event. I'll probably finish the rest of the event as long as the gameplay doesn't become ridiculously difficult to unlock items or something. I do like that Cletus is getting an alternate costume in this event though (at least judging from the Act 3 tease), I'd rather have alternate outfit for other characters then just Homer outfit #674. Weird Al's inclusion is pretty surprising to me though. Is he the first celebrity guest star character that was added to the game since Stephen Hawking in 2016's sci-fi event?
I do love the new title screen drawing though. Not only does the art style totally different from the usual, but it also features most of the Simpsons family instead of just Homer, which is a plus for me.
One weird thing about the game I want to bring up though. I recently got the chance to play the Simpsons Game on an HD console for once (I had only played the game on the Wii and DS versions), and I was shocked to realize that all the music and a good chunk of the voiced clips for Tapped Out are just reused from the Simpsons Game. I mean, it's not something that really bothers me and it does sort of make sense since both games were developed by EA, but it does make me wonder what kind of licensing deal over the voice actors happened in between games in where the Simpsons Game can have all the characters voiced by their usual voice actors with no problems, but by Tapped Out the only characters that are voiced are from the main six actors.