No, Drop the Chicken isn’t a sexual euphenism, rather it’s a lovable but occasionally infuriating iOS title.
Chillingo’s Cut The Rope certainly has a lot to answer for. Last year the ingenious task of cutting ropes to feed the lovable Om Nom captured gamer’s hearts and became arguably the biggest iOS hit since Angry Birds. Months later, it appears that the formula is simple – all you need is a lovable character and simple, physics-based challenges to become the next big thing.
That’s probably what Sharp Creative Agency had in mind when they created Drop The Chicken, an app whose similarities extend a lot further than it’s ‘…. The ….’ title.
Spread across 64 levels in over 4 worlds, Drop The Chicken has all the bells and whistles you might expect from a potential iOS hit – universal iPhone and iPad cross compatibility, full Facebook and Twitter community support and a ‘unique certificate of achievement’ upon completion. If you think that we’re filling you this review with unnecessary details and should be focusing on gameplay instead, that’s only because we reckon Sharp Creative Agency had the priorities when they fit set out to knock Cut The Rope from its perch..
The goal of Drop The Chicken is, understandably, to drop a chicken from a trap door to his nest. As you can imagine, this is easier said than done, with each level employing bombs to impede your egg-laying hero to his eventual goal.
It’s harder than it looks…
Helping you out are a series of movable objects, ranging from bounce pads to wooden platforms, to guide your trajectory towards the nest, with more elaborate objects opening up the further your progress. Flies are also present in each level – succeed in knocking your feathery friend from one side of the screen to the other and back to the nest and you might be rewarded with a three-star rank for your efforts.
The problem with Drop The Chicken is that it’s often far more infuriating than it should be. It’s actually quite difficult to accurately assess how far your chicken will bounce from platforms and as such, completion of every levels requires a huge amount of trial and error. Worse still, restarting levels is nowhere near as fast as it should be as there’s no quick restart button mid-game – it exists but disappears once you’ve pulled the lever for your chicken.
Such frustration means that Drop The Chicken will never have the quick replayability of Cut The Rope yet that title has admittedly set a high bar. Priced at just 79c, there’s still a lot to recommend from Drop The Chicken if you’re looking for some disposable thrills. If you’re looking for glossy, lovingly-presented (the chicken actually juggles if you haven’t touched the screen in a while) but occasionally infuriating iOS challenges, you certainly won’t baulk at the price.
Drop The Chicken is available to download from the Apple App Store for €0.79.
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