Shaolin Run review: running away, Shaolin style

Shaolin Run (师兄快跑) isn’t really a new game. But it has gotten a new lease on life over the past couple of weeks. The game, from Chinese developer Feng Xiaoming, debuted in late October of last year, and it has done pretty well in China since its launch. But since the major 1.4 update in late December, the game has taken off, cracking the top ten on China’s free iOS game charts and, beginning last week, starting to crack the games charts in Singapore and Taiwan, too.

So what’s all the buzz about?

Gameplay: nice umbrella

Shaolin Run is a sidescrolling platformer game that puts you in the shoes of a young Shaolin monk charged with running from left to right collecting coins. It’s the sort of game you’ve almost certainly played before, so rather than describing it in depth I’ll just show it to you. Here’s a video of me playing (terribly) for a few minutes that gives you the basic idea.

Even in this video, you can see that there’s a fair amount of variety in Shaolin Run. You’ll run into the same segments over and over again, but never in the same order, so the tracks you’re running on feel fresh every time. And there are a variety of obstacles to dodge and power-ups to collect that help your progress.

The controls in the game feel pretty good — better than Dad, Where Are We Going? — although as you’d expect they are monumentally simple: tap to jump, hold to deploy your umbrella and slow your descent.

There’s also a shop you can use to buy some utilities and upgrades in addition to new monk characters. Some of these cost real money, but many can be purchased using just the gold you’ve collected in-game. Shaolin Run deserves a lot of credit for not including that scourge of Chinese free mobile games, the stamina system.

All in all, Shaolin Run isn’t the sort of thing you’re going to sit down and play for two hours at a time without getting monumentally bored, but there’s enough depth there to keep you coming back for shorter 10- or 15-minute sessions throughout your week.

Visuals, sound, and content: pretty enough

Shaolin Run, as you can see from the images and the video above, looks and sounds pretty good. It’s got a strong traditional Chinese theme evident everywhere from the large red drum jumps to the sitting Buddha carved into a mountain in the background. The graphics look quite nice (at least on a small iPhone screen), and the background music fits quite well and is unobtrusive enough that it’s actually very relaxing. The opera-style cymbal crashes at the end when you run into an obstacle and fail is an especially nice touch.

It’s not perfect, of course. I think the look and sound of the monk himself is actually pretty weak (did he need to be made so baby-like?), and the forgetful old monk in the tutorial feels kind of cliche and unnecessary. It could also use a bit more variety in terms of the background images that pass as you run from section to section. But these are minor complaints; for the most part, it’s all good.