Mar 27, 2012
Temple Run on Android is finally here! Yes, after countless fakes, a month delay, and plenty of apps that tried to take advantage of the game’s popularity (on launch day, the actual Temple Run was a couple dozen apps down the list on Google Play when searching for “Temple Run”). Well, Imangi’s smash hit auto-runner is here on Android, and despite a few early technical glitches, it does not disappoint.
The gameplay is the same: try to jump, slide, tilt and turn in time to keep running away from the evil monkeys chasing the ever-running hero down. Of course, along the way there are coins to collect, and powerups to collect coins, become invincible, or boost ahead to pick up as well. Coins can be spent on unlocking new characters, unlocking and upgrading powerups, and buying temporary boosts, including revive wings that will continue a run, but only are active for 30 seconds at a time.
The game was rebuilt in Unity, and the conversion was just about perfect. This looks and feels like Temple Run on iOS. That’s a very good thing, because the game is still a ton of fun. It’s easy to just jump from one session to the next, trying to collect even more coins, and raise that high score even higher. Temple Run does do a great job at being “free to have fun.” Coins are awarded at a regular rate, and it steadily increases over time as the player gets better, so spending coins is a way to get more coins. There’s none of that “second currency” funny business that other games use. This is a great free game.
The game is not really tablet-friendly at this point; on the Motorola Xoom, the game clearly looks like it has scaled-up graphical elements, and the frame rate does stutter a bit. On the Samsung Captivate, the game crashes every few games or so, with some occasional stuttering at times. The game supposedly supports over 700 devices at launch, but it’s still something being smoothed out. There are no online leaderboards at launch, like how the iOS version supported Game Center and showed friends’ scores while running. This is actually a rather notable omission, though Android’s lack of a built-in service make it harder to do. Some of my favorite times on the iOS version were when I was having high score battles with a friend.
Temple Run is popular for a good reason: it’s still extremely addictive and fun to play. There’s still a few things to iron out at launch, but the core game has been represented well. This is a must-have on Android just as it was on iOS.
