It's getting harder and harder to review anything in the endless runner genre as they all follow the same mechanical template with little variation. Get as far as you can, die, use the currency collected to unlock perks to help you get further, rinse, repeat. Even with good presentation and the developer behind Conker's Bad Fur Day at the helm, Parachute Stan is an endless runner that follows the same template. I guess you have to take each game on its own merits, broader context aside, so let us look at this game of free falling and farting dogs.

Stan has escaped from an evil baron by flinging himself from an airship. Now comes the game as you tilt your iPhone left and right to collect coins, while you try and avoid smacking into blimps and mines. You have limited movement up or down as well, just for some added fidelity. The trick here is relegating your speed. The more you free-fall, the faster you go. This makes it harder to control, and you don't want to reach terminal velocity as that would be extremely unhealthy. Therefore you need to tap the screen to bring out your parachute. This will slow you down, and make evasion easier, but it also allows the evil baron to get a fix on your location. It's just that without parachute, the tilting has a tendency to over-steer and be far too loose, causing you having to over-correct by tilting the other way. The end result is you never exactly move where you're planning to and especially later on when some precise mine and plane dodging is needed, the flaw in the controls becomes apparent, especially since really aside from being a little more boring, there's not really a downside for having your parachute deployed.

To help you out are pals like the farting dog that can be collected to destroy mines, and if you collect three plans, you are able to pilot a gun that is quite useful in taking out mines and other planes. While this happens, the game presents a war-torn World War I-esque sky and Stan himself makes lots of quips in an annoying chipmunk-y voice. The visuals help to sell the experience; the sound... not so much.

So yes, as endless runners go, Parachute Stan is kind of interesting. The speed regulation is neat, but it's not paramount to the gameplay, and the overshoot when not deploying the parachute is very annoying. There are also some performance issues on earlier ios models, but if you use endless runners as a way to pass the time when you have a few minutes to spare, this one is well made enough to give it a chance.