“Hit” Flash game Chicken Raid (Out Now, $0.99) finally wings its way onto iOS. If this physics-based puzzler’s concept seems vaguely familiar, there’s good reason for that:Â Chicken Raid basically flips the Angry Birds script and requires you to take the birds out instead of the pigs. In order to do this you have to strategically destroy parts of the environment so that objects land on their heads and they disappear in a poof of feathers.
Gameplay is very simple. Tap parts of the environment to break it and crash into birds to earn stars. Sometimes there are treasure boxes to crack open and coins or bombs and TNT to collect in order to help you blow up birds. You can also tap bits of scenery if you want an object to slide or fall in a certain direction and that works really well.
With the coins you earn you can buy special bombs to help you clear levels that you can’t beat. The tried-and-tested 3 star system is present so if you want perfection across the 3 chapters and 72 levels, go for it. That’s really all there is to it. It’s a quick and fleetingly fun game to play if you’re looking for something quick and casual but you can find sooo many similar games on the App Store that do the same thing better and for the same price. In the earlier levels, I would crash everything down but miss a bird or two. So I’d tap all over the screen randomly at the objects that weren’t broken and somehow, if it were near a bird, it would eliminate it. I don’t know how it worked but it did. There are some humorless comics to collect, but who cares? The fun lasted a whole 10 minutes for me.
The sound design in this game drove me absolutely nuts. Right from the start of the game you’re hit with some screeching chicken voice yelling at you like it’s a fowl version of Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket. The music is playful and whimsical and there are birds incessantly chirping in the background. Throughout the game, the chickens make typical chicken noises as you vanquish them and after a couple minutes or so you’re going to want to shut the sound off, especially when you get rid of multiple chickens at the same time. Visually, Chicken Raid borrows heavily from games that you’ve probably played before. The background of the first world is straight out of Tiny Wings and the ice and wood blocks look like they were dragged and dropped from Angry Birds. Not much originality here.
iFanzine Verdict: It’s a physics based puzzler. You already know a boatload of these exist, so do you really need another? I certainly didn’t, especially when Chicken Raid pretty much rips off from those others. You’ve played this game before and the fun fades pretty quickly in this one.