Rooftop Escape Review

If you found yourself falling from the top of a high building, what would you choose to break your fall?

Several thousand mattresses would probably be my choice.

A can or two of beer also wouldn't go amiss – partly to give me the dutch courage to step off the ledge in the first place, and partly to bulk up the beer belly to make bouncing back onto my feet all the more likely.

Conversely, Rooftop Escape makes clothes lines its survival aid of choice. The idea is to wrap the threads around you to slow your descent. Play for long enough, however, and you might just be hoping the line catches around your neck and puts you out of your misery.

Such apathy stems from the fact that Rooftop Escape is not only late to the party, but it's turned up when all the booze has been drunk and those cheap cheesy puffs you brought have been firmly ground into the carpet.

That's because, in terms of structure, Rooftop Escape is Canabalt turned on its head.

Instead of leaping across from one building to the next, play drops you from the top of a skyrise and tasks you with slipping left and right until, inevitably, you find yourself walking up to those famous pearly gates.

Shifting your position as you fall is handled by touching either side of the screen. Press left and you'll find yourself darting off in that direction, with the idea being to dash from side to side to avoid the balconies that, in an intentionally haphazard fashion, decorate the floors at random.

As is the norm, the longer you manage to last, the most points stream onto your total.

It's not enough to simply dodge those decks, however.

The only way to slow your pace is to snag yourself on a series of clothes lines. Snagged in a chain, each one holds you back for a few seconds, but this in turn makes it far easier to spot the next line and position yourself accordingly.

The game's setting aside, spotting and tapping up this succession of clothes lines is the one element that separates Rooftop Escape from other endless runners. Sadly, however, it's in no way as satisfying as timing that dances across the skyline in Canabalt.

Indeed, though the idea might have translated on the drawing board, in practice there's very little to enjoy about Rooftop Escape.

It's functional, and if you've been drinking Red Bull for several hours it's likely your reactions will be good enough to see you clock up a fair distance, but describing it as 'fun' would be embellishment in the extreme.

A large portion of that is due to the fact that developer Color Box Software has taken one look at Canabalt, and decided to emulate its look in every respect. It results in a game that has absolutely no character of its own.

Rooftop Escape is black and white, adorned with retro arcade tones, and comes equipped with graphics that look as if lifted from a NES classic – exactly the same combination that drew so much attention to Semi Secret Software's release at launch.

It's an intentional clone, and one that it would be possible to forgive if the game underneath it was as playable as the title it was aping.

But it doesn't even come close, and even the addition of set goals – such as lasting for a specific distance, or bagging enough clothes lines – isn't enough to keep you hooked.

In fact, rather than pushing players over the edge in the first place, Rooftop Escape could do with taking its own advice, and taking a long walk off a very short, and unfathomably tall, building.