Hey! That's My Fish!

You've got to feel for penguins. Those of the Emperor variety migrate about 70 miles every year on stumpy legs hardly suited to distance walking, the males sit on an eggs for two months in -40 degrees centigrade temperatures and every time they pop into the sea for a snack they're at risk of being mauled by leopard seals, but still us humans regard them as a source of comedy.

Jesus, what's an animal got to do in this world to be taken seriously?

Well, it's not to star in a mobile game, as Hey! That's My Fish! proves. This game very much portrays the penguins' apparent playful side, showing them as it does using fishing rods, skidding about on black ice and bouncing on trampolines. None of which is behaviour we've seen David Attenborough reporting on. Perhaps it's in the Life in the Freezer DVD extras.

There is, of course, a reason for all this malarkey. Your troupe of penguins is desperately trying to collect fish scattered about a big icy grid of hexagons. You have four penguins on your team, which you can move – one at a time – in a straight line of as many hexagons as you fancy to reach these heaps of fish.

What makes the task trickier is that you're up against a rival penguin team – either AI controlled or a human opponent. And every time a penguin leaves an icy block, the block melts.

Penguins might be able to use trampolines and fishing rods, but they can't hop over another penguin or one of these gaps in the ice, of course. This means that after you and your opponent have begun taking turns, the grid gets increasingly hard to navigate, and eventually all of your penguins will be trapped on solitary blocks of ice with nowhere to move except into the sea.

Based on this, you could conclude this game is a stark visualisation of the reality of global warming. What I'm going to conclude, though, is that this all makes for a very enjoyable strategy game.

The strategy being that brainlessly hopping about gulping down the maximum number of fish won't generally win you the game because if your opponent is concentrating on cutting your penguins off from the rest of the grid, they'll quickly land themselves in the position of being able to hop freely around the whole map while all your penguins can do is watch.

You need to employ different strategies for different levels, since you can choose to play ones with extra items and other conditions. You can have snow drifts, which cover up how many fish are lurking on each tile, and you can turn on 'shoving', which means you can push an opponent's penguin right off the map if they land next to you.

Those aforementioned trampolines enable you to bounce a few hexagons in any direction, black ice makes it possible to slide an extra tile and fishing rods let you pluck fish from surrounding tiles without moving to them.

You can also play a game with rotten fish scattered about, wherein landing on those squares deducts fish from your total.

Hey! That's My Fish! is a fun little strategy game and equally fun against the competent AI as it is playing four-player via Bluetooth (or playing against others using one handset).

Visually it's nothing special, but the penguins are cute and so are the smart little quips they come out with when you land next to them. The game's got personality and it's got that one-more-go factor in snowdrifts, even if it does misrepresent the poor hard-working penguin in the process.