Everyone loves a sequel - well, Hollywood, the game industry and all their test audiences and money men do, anyway. So, perhaps it should be of little surprise that today’s App of the Day on Pocket-lint is another in a wave of hit app second comings. You played the original, you powered up until you could power up no more, now you can download the part deux. Sneakers at the ready, it’s...
Temple Run 2
Yes, Temple Run 2. Like the first version, it’s a never-ending chase game. Just as before you have a large nasty chasing you (except this time, it’s one giant gorilla instead of a gang of three crow people), you’ve got an ancient treasure in your hand and you’re going to die eventually. The only question, of course, is how many coins can you collect, how far can you run and, ultimately, will you get a higher score than anyone else you know? You won’t.
What’s been added this time around are quite a few things, actually. On the obvious side, the graphics are much better and - unfortunately, and perhaps unnecessarily - much harder going on your device. Yes, it’s interesting to have more atmosphere, rocky undulations and better rendered character behinds but if you’re not running the game on the latest iThing, it can be a bit jerky from time to time and you will curse it when your game ends because of that.
The coin system is still there but the concept of gems has been added and gems can buy you little extras like the ability to continue your game from where you left off after you’ve gone splat. You can collect both but, if you’re going to be really serious about Temple Run 2, you might want to willingly throw yourself into the freemium trap and buy them for real world pennies and pounds.
The power-ups are pretty much the same as before except that each of the four playable characters has a native one which you can activate by double tapping at any point in the game. There are also a couple of gameplay differences too. Along with the more obvious additions of rope slides and mine cart sequences, your path now has a couple of new obstacles - rivers, spikey rollers et al - and it undulates, which adds a lot more difficulty to the game than you might think.
At the heart of Temple Run 2, though, it’s really Temple Run in new clothing. We wouldn’t say don’t download it - it’s free, after all - but, as good as the first one was, we tired of it, and, despite the added bells and whistles, it’s not really a concept that thrills us any more.
