Temple Run 2 review

Temple Run 2
Developer Imangi Studios
Publisher Imangi Studios
Free; Age rating 9+
Out now (iOS), next week (Android)

A surprise smartphone smash, the original Temple Run was the independent game that wouldn’t stop selling. After a slow start, it picked up speed through word-of-mouth, accelerating into a sprint with celebrity endorsements on Twitter, and soon took up residence at the top of the App Store charts. Its popularity has waned a little since its peak, but it’s still selling, and currently boasts over 170 million downloads on Apple and Android devices.

How, then, do you follow such a hit? If you’re developer Imangi Studios, you make a sequel, of course. It’s immediately evident where some of the money has been spent: this is a much better-looking game than its predecessor, with strikingly detailed environments and more varied level topography. Your intrepid archaeologist now sprints away from a giant demonic ape instead of several smaller ones, and periodically glides down ziplines and hops into minecarts as his journey demands.

Otherwise, it seems little has changed. Your role as an avaricious Indiana Jones-type adventurer is all but identical: he automatically runs down an endless labyrinth of paths in an ultimately doomed attempt to escape his simian foe, and it’s your job to to swipe, tilt and tap to help him turn corners, slide beneath barriers and leap over obstacles. All the while, you’re collecting coins that feed both into your score and a cumulative total, reserved for items and upgrades that give you a better chance of achieving a greater distance on your next run.

Unfortunately, like its hero, Imangi has succumbed to greed, like a wide-eyed Elsa Schneider rejecting Indy’s hand to grasp for the grail. An additional currency in the form of gems allows you to restart from where you fell, and though subsequent recoveries are progressively costlier, cash-rich players can exploit both this and the upgrade system to simply buy high scores. The visual overhaul, meanwhile, has unwanted side-effects, causing noticeable stutters on older hardware and making obstacles difficult to parse at high speed. The original may look a little unhewn by comparison, but there’s a clarity its sequel lacks.

It’s impossible to deny the frisson generated every time you cheat death by a pixel’s width or a hundredth of a second: at its core, Temple Run is still a breathlessly exciting game. Equally, however, it’s hard not to feel a little cheated by a decidedly unambitious follow-up that has its eye firmly trained on your wallet.