Super Monkey Ball Tip 'n Tilt 2

The animal rights issue is an odd one. Put a hamster in a plastic orb and he loves it. Do the same thing to a dog and he's well within his rights to bury your shoes. Go for a monkey and you're looking at jail time. It would seem that the greater the intelligence of the animal, the less happy he's likely to be about spending time in a plastic ball, but the highest animal of all – the games journalist – would like nothing more. How do you legislate for that kind of inconsistency?

You can't.

It's a good job that video games aren't obliged to tackle such questions, because the monkey at the centre of Super Monkey Ball's eponymous orb has been having a blast since it rolled onto Nintendo's GameCube all the way back in 2001. The franchise suffered a slightly bumpy arrival onto the mobile handset with Super Monkey Ball Tip 'n Tilt, but Glu is attempting to rights its course with this sequel.

The object of the game is to make sure a falling monkey lands on a solid surface, which is a noble aspiration by anybody's reckoning. Each of the single-player game's 45 levels is made up of platforms that not only tip and tilt, but swing and revolve as well, and these are both your saviour and hazard, since without them you'd be boned, but they also do everything they can to make your journey difficult.

The basic platforms tip like see-saws, dipping further as you roll towards either side. Others do the same but inversely, ramping up in front of you. Another sort swing back and forth, while another rise and fall like lifts, and yet another still revolve in concert with others connected to them, so that they flatten out like a trick staircase.

You negotiate these by rolling sluggishly in your ball, dropping from one to the next like a marble in a Helter Skelter set, and if you miss one you generally have to watch your monkey plummet to his death and wait to start again.

By pressing '5', you can crack your ball in half and use the hollow domes to help you glide, which it's sometimes necessary to do in order to cross a gap. Your gliding power is determined by the number of bananas you collect on the way down, and it's useful to have as many in reserve as you can swallow, since the ability to jump out of trouble from time to time will save you a lot of frustration.

Even so, Tip 'n Tilt 2 can be incredibility frustrating, because there's virtually no give. As soon as you go slightly adrift you're pretty much assured of an impotent death, doomed to drift past platforms towards which a thousand bananas wouldn't be sufficient to propel you. Recoveries are rare.

It's possible at any point to freeze the action and pan around the level by pressing the left soft-key, the value of which is not only that it enables you to see what lies ahead, but that it gives you the opportunity to choose your path. You can opt to tumble down each of the tilting platforms, collecting as many bananas as you can, but it's often possible to take a far easier – although less profitable – path to the target platform at the bottom of the level.

Despite the relatively generous serving of 45 single-player levels – 15 of which need to be unlocked – there's very little variety. Some require you to make your way straight down, some straight across, and several in a diagonal path, but they all involve falling onto a fairly narrow range of platform types using an extremely limited range of movements.

Which would be fine if the tumbling were fun in itself, but Tip 'n Tilt 2 isn't the fluid, physics-driven game we suspect it's supposed to be, and at times comes close to being. When you're making your way down a well-spaced arrangement of platforms, feathering '4' and '6' to control your descent, it has whisper of the organic quality of a game like Kamikaze Robots or SolaRola, but whenever you feel like you're finding a rhythm poor level-design and flimsy controls turn up and ruin everything.

Tip 'n Tilt 2 is close to being good, and of course this means parts of it are good. The idea behind the gameplay is sound, and it's all very nicely presented, going so far as to give you the choice of which monkey you'd like to cram into the ball from the infantile cast of Aiai, Meemee, Baby, and Gongon.

You can also play both the Time Attack and Challenge modes – in which you play against the clock and for the highest score, respectively – against up to three others. Once you've done enough, a Random mode (where you have to play 15 levels from the single-player game at random) unlocks and this is also for up to four players.

Unfortunately, though, four people playing a flawed game won't have any more fun than one, and unlocking extra levels is only appealing if the levels you have to play to unlock them are themselves worth playing. Expectedly, that 'if' hangs over Tip 'n Tilt 2 like a butcher's hook.