Cannon Rats

Given the passing of each month seems to bring with it news of Rovio hitting another new sales milestone, it's perhaps safe to say that everyone on the planet has played Angry Birds at least once by now.

Which, when you think about it, makes it especially odd that publishers seem so keen on aping it.

When the game they're mirroring is free in the first place, who do they think will stand back and say "Angry Birds? Pah! I'd rather play something that desperately wants to be Angry Birds, but isn't, AND costs me more money!"

Someone at Gameloft clearly thought that offering up a swarthy band of rats instead of fluffy things with wings would set its take on Angry Birds apart.

As you might expect, the only thing that really differentiates Cannon Rats from its source material is that one is very good, and one, quite frankly, is not.

The idea here is to knock down a succession of contraptions housing a collection of cats. Just as in Angry Birds, it's the eponymous rodents that serve as your arsenal: some act as little more than cannon fodder, while others bring special abilities activated with the '5' key.

Said rats are fired out of a cannon, with both the angle and the power of the shot determined pre-launch (the latter a simple case of holding down '5' for as long as you dare).

Each shot then leaves a trail across the screen that you can use to guide any attempts that follow.

As well as killing cats, you can also pick up gems and coins, if you're clever enough to deviate your route. In truth, though, there's very little that Cannon Rats does that either Angry Birds or one of its flock of followers doesn't already have covered.

What's more, the design of the structures that house your enemy swing wildly between being especially bland or ridiculously fiddly to penetrate.

The levels that adopt the happy medium between the two - and which should be Cannon Rats's bread and butter - are far too rare. As a result, completing its stages is either easily attainable but tedious, or a question of plain old perseverance.

There are, of course, worse Angry Birds wannabes out there – Monty Python's Cow Tossing the one that immediately springs to mind – but it's hard to imagine Gameloft's sterile and predictable Cannon Rats will be passing any million milestones of its own in the months to come.