Aerobic fitness takes a monumental step up
Monumental - Stair Climbing Game Free Rating 9/10
Lines get blurred with Monumental, the stair-climbing game. It is a fitness app, but the graphics are cartoonish, so you can almost imagine you are at home playing a computer game.
In this app you are a tourist visiting monuments around the world. As you climb stairs in the real world, an in-app accelerometer records your progress, and so you ascend monuments in the virtual world.
Before starting the climb, the building is greyed out, but as you make your way up it is revealed. At the top, you are rewarded with a real photo of the view. Strangely, the promise of this image provided me with sufficient motivation.
In fact, I climbed up one more flight of stairs than was necessary so that I could 'reach' the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy to check out the view. I even got a tacky souvenir, which is kept in a virtual display cabinet for me to admire later.
The app provides 11 buildings to climb, such as the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur and the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. There is a set sequence of buildings to scale so you cannot skip ahead to climb a building of your choice.
The only thing that made this app less enjoyable than it could have been was that my friends wouldn't join in. The app allows you to invite Facebook friends to join the game and compete against each other, with each person's step count recorded on a leader board.
Friends or no friends, the app keeps me climbing instead of taking the lift. Of course, you could use it in the gym and probably achieve all the buildings in a week, and there is nothing to stop you setting that as your goal and restarting next week.
So for the time being I am at the top of my own solitary leader board and will keep on climbing to check out the view - until I realise that it would be far easier to Google it.
