Escape from Age of Monsters

Don’t believe what Sesame Street tells you - monsters are bad. The beasts in Escape from Age of Monsters eat your children first and teach them the alphabet later.

You may be underwhelmed to learn that Escape from Age of Monsters is yet another endless-runner, albeit one with some truly glorious presentation.

It’s stuffed with beautifully sinister, gorgeously animated artwork - iPad 3 owners are in for a real treat - and it’s this delicious atmosphere that gives the game much of its appeal.

Beneath that gloss lays a game that’s entertaining, if far from exemplary. As you tear along corridors, bounding from building to building, you’re constantly pursued by a host of drooling, clawing creatures. Fall too far behind and one of your diminutive, wide-eyed companions gets chomped - lose too many kids and it’s Game Over.

All the while a series of colour-coded barriers threaten to slow you down - conveniently, the colours happen to match the two monstrous gloves on your fists.

With a right-tap you can burst through obstacles with a devastating blue punch, and a left tap lands a red one. Progress simply involves matching colours to smash ever onwards.

Occasionally, Escape from Age of Monsters mixes it up by swapping out barriers for flaming skulls, but the basic principle is always the same.

It might be basic, but somehow the pure visceral display of carnage on-screen, the increasingly tense test of rhythmic reflex and recall, and an oblique power-up system that introduces an element of risk all add up to an endless-runner that’s far more thrilling than its underlying components would suggest.

That said, Escape from Age of Monsters somehow botches a few elements that it shouldn't. For instance, its objective-based reward system simply isn’t creative enough to sustain interest, and the coin-grabbing mechanic falls flat thanks to a store lacking in any worthy upgrades.

Still, Escape from Age of Monsters gets most of the important things right - it’s fast-paced and frenetic enough to dish up the kind of adrenaline fix that makes these high score-chasing games so moreish, even if its more structured reward system is a bit of a misfire. Slight it might be, but monstrous it’s not.

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