Mega Run: Redford's Adventure iPad Review

If you don't have a rich story to drive your game forward then you'd better at least have a seriously likeable character to engage players with instead. It's so often the failing of a mobile game, where you're assumed to simply care about the character's predicament and throw yourself into their adventure simply because you bothered to turn up in the first place.

Fortunately Mega Run has just such a likeable chap, and he's already charmed the socks off a huge number of gamers if the App Store rankings are anything to go by. Redford runs from left to right across each sprawling, colorful level and you'll need to tap the screen to make him leap between platforms, bop off the heads off enemies and reach the exit. These levels are all generously long and have multiple paths to choose from, with a bucket-load of upgrades tucked away.

The magnet upgrade draws coins towards you.

Gather enough coins and pick up the gems that are hidden away in each level and you'll achieve a three-star rating. There are four worlds to work through at present, each containing twenty levels, and they're all beautifully colored. Each has its own insanely infectious calypso soundtrack and the developer has promised that more worlds are coming in a future update.

As you level up you unlock new characters to play with, and there's a fantastic choice of power-ups to acquire that range from coin-attracting magnets, to ice blocks that snare enemies, and explosive fireballs which clear the path ahead. Once you've ranked Redford up to the appropriate level, these upgrades can be purchased with the coin currency you collect during gameplay, and will then appear randomly in future games.

The more coins you collect, the sooner you can get your hands on those upgrades.

Mega Run also has one of the least offensive in-app purchase systems I've ever seen. Every possible upgrade can be earned through a reasonable amount of gameplay as you level up, but if you're particularly impatient you can buy some in-game dollars and get ahead of the game a little bit quicker. This is a gamble for Get Set Games that works out very well for the gamer, and we can only hope it works out well for them too given the ever-more aggressive currency systems we've seen creep in over the last 12 months.

Even the gloomier levels have a vibrance about them.

Mega Run is a lovely game that oozes charm and will delight players of all ages. Even if you think you can't possibly bear to play another screen-tapping automatic runner, we're pretty sure you'll fall in love with Redford's adventure regardless.