Sir Lovalot

They’re a randy lot, the nobility. Whether flirting with visiting dignitaries, making advances on servants, or sneaking into one of their many guest rooms in the middle of the night, they’re incorrigible.

That’s the cliché, anyway.

You could argue that Sir Lovalot is a cliché itself, both in its portrayal of an insatiable knight and its tried and tested perpetual-climbing gameplay. Fortunately, there’s a bit more to it than that.

While the game follows the template laid down by countless preceding games – you climb endlessly like Doodle Jump, you control your character by tilting your handset like Bird Strike – it applies a subtle twist with the nature of the ascent.

Rather than a flat two-dimensional playing field, Sir Lovalot scales a fully three-dimensional tower in his search for, er, "love." As such, you only see a relatively small portion of the platforms available to you at any one time.

This subtly affects the way you play, prompting a number of risky jumps into the unknown as you commit to a huge lateral jump without knowing exactly where you’ll land.

Fortunately, the tilt controls are responsive and accurate enough to empower you to make these leaps of faith, as you can adjust your position at the last second when a suitable platform pans into view.

The game also wisely permits you to drop a few levels before hitting you with a Game Over screen, which emboldens you to take slight risks.

The platforms themselves are the typical array of normal, treacherous, and height-boosting examples, and there are the usual power-ups that protect you from damage or send you rocketing skywards. As well as a chicken, you can land on a maiden’s balcony for a handy leg-up (in more ways than one).

There’s also a wide range of loot to collect, which serves no practical use other than offering a target of collecting them all. OpenFeint integration with leaderboards and achievements provides further incentives.

You won’t find anything revolutionary in Sir Lovalot, other than the central tower (and by that I mean it revolves). Yet, it's a polished, subtly enhanced take on the genre that should keep anyone not sick to the back teeth of endless jumping happy.