Game Reviews

Tiki Towers 2: Monkey Republic

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Tiki Towers 2: Monkey Republic
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| Tiki Towers 2

You can draw plenty of parallels between monkeys and humans. You can even train a monkey to act like a human and dress it up in clothes.

Ultimately a monkey is a monkey, and it will only develop to a point. You’re never going to find one reciting Oscar Wilde or taking to an internet forum to demand the reinstatement of Firefly.

It’s apt that Tiki Towers 2 – a game preoccupied with monkey business – sticks to what it knows and fails to grow in any meaningful way.

Monkey see, monkey do again

The first Tiki Towers, which was released almost two years ago, was an accomplished physics puzzler for its time.

Aping the gameplay of then flavour-of-the-month, World of Goo (my how things change), it had you building bridges and ladders to help a gaggle of chimps along their way.

Tiki Towers 2: Monkey Republic offers an identical brand of puzzle play. While it remains supremely playable, iPhone gaming has moved on - this sequel is cast in a slightly less flattering light as a result.

As with the original, you touch and drag on the screen during a preliminary building phase to construct makeshift structures out of bamboo. As the bamboo allowance is strictly limited according to the stage, you need to be quite wily with your placement.

Ape escape

This is especially true when you consider the laws of physics, which only kick in once you finish the building and release the monkeys. At this point, gravity takes hold of your ramshackle effort, twisting and contorting it in ways you might not have envisioned.

Add to that the weight of half a dozen unruly monkeys and your early efforts are likely to result in tragedy more often than triumph - or at least the comical sight of monkeys scratching their heads and staring at you.

Time has been slightly unkind to the implementation – particularly when it comes to the controls. Not being able to see exactly where you’re placing your bamboo sticks is surprisingly irritating here in 2011, as is trying to pan the camera around without accidentally laying a piece.

Monkey island

Some of the level design, while admirable in offering original challenges like stretchy vines held over lava pits, do more to frustrate than innovate. Completing some levels comes down to lucky trial-and-error.

This isn’t helped by the rather stingy bamboo allowances, which don’t permit the same scope for experimentation and variation as the series’s obvious inspiration, World of Goo.

Still, the core puzzling at the heart of Tiki Towers 2: Monkey Republic remains joyous and fun. The new focused plot concerning a monkey dictator might be silly, but it lends the game a welcome sense of structure as you progress through his island stronghold.

Branching paths and bonus items spice up the journey, and there’s plenty of variation to the physics-based challenges you face throughout its 30 levels (which, disappointingly, is around half what the original offered).

You can never change a monkey’s ways, then, but you’ll never take away its sense of fun either.

Tiki Towers 2: Monkey Republic

While it maintains the standards set by the original, the law of diminishing returns – and the lack of any meaningful progress in its physics-based gameplay - brings Tiki Towers 2 down a peg or two
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Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.