There's a few cases in the iPhone App Store where you find a real gem for an absurdly low price. Tiki Towers is one such example, selling at just 99¢. Presumably RealArcade had difficulty with a higher price point, but whatever the reason is, you won't go wrong with this game. The monkeys might though.

At it's core, the game is a platform puzzler which gives a nod to titles such as Lemmings, and more recently, World of Goo - in that you don't actually control your ape friends, you build bamboo towers so that they can swing, collect bananas, and generally monkey about until they reach the exit. Looking around is done with two fingers (to avoid building) and building towers is a standard touch and drag affair - you just place your finger on the screen near a starting point and it will draw a triangle of bamboo for you. You can erase by touching that piece again, but it's flaky and can cause a lot of problems. Fortunately then, a recently added 'Erase Mode' lets you scrub the screen of unwanted timber. Gravity only appears once you hit the play button, and so you can create your structure and tweak it without it falling over all the time.

Because when you do hit the play button the camera switches to a filmstrip view, the monkeys will burst out of their box and then they will grapple with your bamboo stack - if it's weak, it will break, sending apes to their certain demise, or merely leaving them stranded. To successfully finish a level (45 in total), you must rescue all five of the monkeys, and to get a gold monkey you will need to collect all five bananas scattered around the surroundings. Some levels will require you to build your tower just right so that the bananas attach to it, making them reachable. Others will have you devising spinning wheels to ferry the monkeys to the exit. There's plenty of variety spread across five distinctive islands, and it's not easy getting perfect on every level.

The presentation in Tiki Towers is excellent. The monkeys themselves are full of personality, grinning from ear to ear when they manage to snag a banana, looking glum if they can't make it across, and they flail their arms about and do all kinds of crazy actions whilst moving on through the level. The user interface feels fast, fluid and intuitive, and the graphics are vivid and colourful. The music is good, although can be annoying after repeated plays, but the sound effects are top notch. Put simply, it's a very easy game to get to grips with, and very difficult to put down.

Tiki Towers is outstanding because of two reasons - the amount of fun you get from watching monkeys demolishing bamboo in order to hunt for bananas, and secondly the price point. It's an instantly accessible game that's stupidly cheap, and for that reason it deserves to be on every iPhone.

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