Bird

Life as a tropical bird would be bittersweet. Brainless, hungry, and colourfully edible to most predators, your existence would be unbearable but for one thing: whenever you wanted, you could take flight and soar high above the jungle, wheeling gloriously in the warm sky while your troubles languished below.

Then, on the horizon, eagles.

Nevertheless, if you were to poll the tropical bird population with the question, "What's the best thing about being a tropical bird?", 99 per cent would surely return with, "I can fly." What else is there?

It seems a shame, then, that the action in Bird is confined to the fledgling stages of your avian avatar's life – hopping, leaping, gliding, but, alas, nothing more.

The games takes place in a rainforest called the Valley of Dreams, which has been governed for centuries by the eponymous Ancestral Bird. Then, disaster strikes! Whilst brooding over its clutch, the Ancestral Bird is captured by Bzz (a formidable hornet) who is acting in the pay of Gargh (a textually redundant yeti.)

Bird's eggs are also stolen, but the wasps that snatch them manage to lose every last one in the heist. The object of the game, therefore, is to retrieve the eggs and free Ancestral Bird before fleeing from Bzz in a tense and jarringly difficult finale.

During the first few missions, you control a bird – one of the misplaced eggs – that's still unhatched, with its legs protruding from the bottom of the shell. After a few levels, you fall from the trees and emerge from the wreckage of the shell a colourful bird that can shoot out seeds and make longer leaps. A few levels after that you develop into a larger bird, able to glide over distances with a second tap of the jump button.

To complete the game, it's necessary to return to the levels you couldn't complete as an egg or a young bird, and collect the remaining eggs. This mopping-up game format enables you to squeeze some extra gameplay out of the fairly brief missions, but there are too few additional eggs to make it particularly worthwhile – a couple of extra minutes' play is all it takes to collect the few stragglers and proceed to the end.

Still, there are several details that elevate Bird above the general population of mobile platform species. The treetops that you leap and bounce through as an egg are littered with jar-shaped plants that shoot you into the air. As a bird on the forest floor, spitting seeds at the same plants prompts them to emit bubbles that you can hop into to float a few feet skyward.

The seeds that you spit, meanwhile, come from berries that grow on trees. If you pick a bunch of berries, another bunch grows in its place, and if you leave these long enough they ripen and yield more seeds.

Despite these confections, Bird is let down by a lack of inspiration where it really matters: level design and character movement. Your avatar travels at a fixed speed and moves without fluidity or momentum, while the levels can often be sprawling and directionless. The diminutive size of the maps relieves this complaint to a certain extent, since it's difficult to get properly lost in such a small area, but nevertheless some navigation pointers or a mini-map would have been helpful.

Much as pet owners are said to represent their pets, Bird the game resembles its own central character. Both are colourful, mellifluous, and well-meaning, but neither ever really reaches the heights that it might have been capable of.