The folks who brought us Toy Bot Diaries: Volume 1 are back with a completely different iPhone title: Shaky Summit. Choose one of three climbers and race against an opponent (two-player mode included!) to the top of the mountain. It sounds simple enough until the mountain starts to shake as you climb it, forcing you to hold on for dear life and hope that loose boulder above you doesn’t come tumbling down in your direction. I liked Toy Bot Diaries because of its great control scheme and quirky, stylish presentation. Does Shaky Summit climb to new gaming heights, or does it fall short? Hit the jump to find out!

Unlike other racing games where you spend your time manoeuvring around corners and tilting the iPhone left and right, you have but two things to control in Shaky Summit. The first thing is the sprint meter: tap the red button on your side of the screen and you’ll run and recover faster. Recover from what, you ask?

Falling boulders. Snowballing snowballs. Cave-ins. You name it, and Shaky Summit will drop it on you in the the most comical and satisfying way possible. You really get that Road-Runner satisfaction from bonking, tripping, and out-quaking your opponent. There’s a seismograph in the middle of the screen that turns green when you can trigger an earthquake, and triggering one is as simple as tapping on the screen. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t matter where you tap. Small accidents like rocks flipping over or tripping in the mud can be accomplished with a quick tap, but boulders and cave-ins require you to keep your finger on the screen for a second or two. 

You start the game off by choosing one of three characters (there’s also an unlockable fourth char), each with different levels of acceleration, top speed, and recovery. You then pick from easy or medium difficulty (hard is unlocked by finishing all levels in one difficulty). I played through the game as the gigantic man machine: Bobby Q. This is where the game really started to grow on me. Bobby Q is your standard macho man, and he reminds me a lot of Johnny Bravo if you’ve ever heard of the television series. There’s just something about his awesome theme music, his character animations, and the gigantic grin on his face that makes me laugh every time I finish a level. This helps to distinguish the characters as more than just a set of racing characteristics with a 3D model around them.

But characters aren’t enough — you’ll need solid gameplay to back them up, and Shaky Summit delivers this in spades. I found the game incredibly accessible and instantly charming. The first time I started causing quakes I would end up catching myself as well as my opponent in some sort of terrible accident. But as time went on I learned to use the earthquakes more strategically. If you’re both climbing the mountain, for example, you could start a quake the moment the enemy is below one of the boulders. But if you wait just a bit more, you might find a ladder on your side of the screen as you climb. Triggering the quake at this point will hit your enemy with a boulder and knock him down a few notches, while simultaneously dropping the rungs of the ladder and accelerating your climbing rate. It’s a win/win situation, and there are a ton of them that you can create for yourself throughout Shaky Summit.

But you can also use the earthquakes as defense. If there are a couple of rocks ahead of you that you know the enemy will quake down onto your head, you can cause a quake right before you reach the rocks to defend yourself. This is because the seismograph in the middle takes a while to recharge after a quake from either player, so you can use quakes pre-emptively to "dodge" hazards. This is especially exciting in the game’s 2-player mode, where you can actually hear your enemy squeal or shout when one of you inevitably gets hit by something jagged or gigantic.

One of the big reasons this is all so enjoyable is the animations. I criticized Toy Bot Diaries for not having quite enough animations to look fluid, but IUGO has really upped the ante here. Running, falling, or slipping in the mud – everything looks appropriately comical and painful. They’ve also hit on the graphical style I think the iPhone does best with — something that’s not trying to do a realistic 3D engine like next-gen consoles and PC’s can manage. It’s also one of the few iPhone games that has some great music to it, and that really helped draw me into the experience more (although you can also use your iPod while playing, just check settings).

The one negative thing I have to say about the game is that it’s a system hog. I’ve started the game up from a fresh reboot and still received the lovely "low memory" warning. You can still play once you see it, but you will definitely experience some slowdowns and longer loading times. Otherwise the frame rate is almost always high, and the load times are all under five seconds or so.

Shaky Summit was a really pleasant surprise. I have to admit that when I first saw the screenshots and heard about the gameplay mechanics I wasn’t all that excited. I definitely wanted to play the game, but I had no idea it would be so addicting. Over the course of a week it’s become my favourite iPhone game by far, even surpassing Enigmo in my books. I love how easy it is to get into the gameplay, how cooky the actual mechanics are, and how well it all runs on my iPhone. I highly recommend this to every gamer looking for what the iPhone can really offer as a gaming system, and I’d love to see IUGO’s newest offering atop the App Store’s Top 25 summit.

Info:

Developer: IUGO Mobile

Price: $4.99 — get it now!