Super Monkey Ball Tip'n'Tilt

Whether you think it's been masterminded by Al Gore, is genuine evidence of man's ruination of the planet, or is simply the wrath of a vengeful God for our impudence at suggesting Jade Goody and Danielle Lloyd are actual celebrities, the world's suffered some extreme weather recently.

Take our transatlantic brethren, for instance. New York City's enjoyed a sun-drenched heatwave, parts of Los Angeles has had snow and, between the two, places have been hit by sub-zero storms that have covered everything in sheet ice.

Kind of makes the winds we've had in the UK this past week look a bit feeble, but – believe it or not – it's this that leads us towards our review of the new Super Monkey Ball game, Tip'n'Tilt.

Peering out of the window at any passers-by over the last few days, it's looked like the rest of the world had been tipped on its axis, so severely were pedestrians leaning into the wind to avoid being blown over.

If that was you, then you'll be in a good position to sympathise with Ai-Ai, Baby, Gon-Gon and Me-Me, the four super simians who star in Super Monkey Ball Tip'n'Tilt. Encased in what looks like a giant hamster ball, as one of the four you aim to roll your monkey to freedom through a series of challenging maps, tilting the platforms rather than moving the monkey directly, and collecting bananas as you go.

That, in itself, isn't a new concept. In fact, indirect control of your encased ape has lain at the heart of every Super Monkey Ball game on the consoles. But what's new about Super Monkey Ball Tip'n'Tilt is the way in which the levels have been constructed – in 2D, instead of the previous games' Mercury Meltdown-style 3D environments.

In Tip'n'Tilt you start each level at the top of the screen and must make your way to the goal (a painted target) at the bottom via a series of tipping and tilting platforms. It's a bit like those fridge magnet games where you build a course for a marble to run down.

You press your handset's directional pad to the left to tip the platform one way, rolling your balled monkey left, and press to the right to tilt the platform in a manner to roll your monkey the other direction.

It's a strange mechanism to get the hang of initially as it requires a cautious way of thinking about your progress. You can't make snap decisions about where you want your monkey to go, as his or her momentum and the fact that tilting a platform is a gradual affair means that you need to think one or two seconds ahead of yourself.

Making things more difficult are the gaps between the platforms – it's a common occurrence to roll clean off a platform and plummet to your doom – and the various obstacles planted in your way. These include pinball buffers that bounce you back in the direction you came from, sliding platforms, and linked series of platforms that behave like the stairs in haunted houses in cartoons, in that they turn from steps into a smooth slope that people slide down.

In fact, it's all so difficult that Super Monkey Ball Tip'n'Tilt has gone too far. By introducing a way of moving your monkey that you'll probably have not come across before on mobile, and then throwing what are properly hard levels in your way, you've got a game that is, simply, too challenging to enjoy fully.

Granted, the easy levels can be disposed of within a quarter of an hour and provide a relatively friendly way to get acquainted with the Tip'n'Tilt world. But the normal and hard levels are so much more awkward to complete that you soon lose hope.

The game's pretty to look at and is very well put together, so it's hardly an unpleasant trip. But you do end up wondering how on Earth you're ever going to complete it when the margins of error in some instances are as thin as the layer of snow it takes to throw Britain into utter disruption.

A degree of repetition compounds matters; the levels are all too similar for our liking.

Which leaves Super Monkey Ball Tip'n'Tilt as something you're naggingly aware of and resolve to solve, but instead you end up giving up on because it stops you doing other things you enjoy. A bit like global warming, then.