Game Review: Tall Man Run (Mobile – Free to Play)

Chances are, you’ve played a free to play game like Tall Man Run before. It is just a reskin of an endless number of similar games. However, thanks to the simple fact that it does it better than most of the others, it can be called a decent game at least.

From Supersonic Studios. Tall Man Run puts you in control of a malleable shape that can be stretched thin, made fat or vice versa. You do this by picking up height and weight boosts, walking through multiplier gates and avoiding the ones that will make you smaller and thinner.

Why do you want to be tall and wide? So, when you get to the end of the track you earn as many gems as possible and, take out the big, bad boss.

Don’t get too excited about that part though as it really isn’t that interesting. The boss in question, taken down regardless of your remaining size. All you need to do is make it to the end of the run and it plays out in the exact same fashion. Hell, you don’t even control it at this point.

Really, the only benefit for bothering is to get the gem bonuses which are then spent on upgrading your starting size and speed. As well as buying different colour skins and hats to wear. It’s arbitrary stuff but in a free to play game, welcome, simply because it adds some longevity to a very repetitive experience.

It’s par for the course with games like this so anything that gives you reasons to keep on playing is a good thing. It’s why Tall Man Run gets a higher score than most. Although it should be noted that in the version we played (version 1.16) we ran into an issue that meant we had to restart the game on several occasions.

When upgrading several parameters of our character, if we pressed play too soon after upgrading, it would freeze. Not the game but the character, unable to move forward. It was quickly fixed with a restart but this happened on 3 occasions across 50 levels. It only stopped once we stopped hitting play too fast after upgrading.

It’s a small thing but the small things matter with these games.