Farm Attack

As any good UFO obsessive will tell you, aliens love messing with animals. Whether they’re getting abducted for experimentation or vapourised just for fun, it doesn’t pay to be a cow when extra terrestrials are nearby.

Farm Attack takes this premise and extends it beyond the usual cattle mutilations into less discriminatory territory. As far as this title is concerned, any decent-sized quadruped is fair game. Cows, hippos, and even elephants are valid targets for marauding extra-planetary visitors.

According to the poorly translated blurb, the planet Amrof is dying, and its inhabitants need to source organic matter to save it. Cast as Narkon, a monocular invader of the space variety, you must collect earth animals by using your ship’s orga-beam to transport them off the planet.

Due to some unexplained teleportation-related bureaucracy, this beam only works when four or more animals of the same are grouped together.

Thus, the scene is set for yet another block-matching puzzler of the Bejeweled ilk, which, though by no means broken, fails to differentiate itself from the herd.

The animals line up at the bottom of the screen in neat rows, edging their way up one row at a time until they reach the horizon. You guide a hovering spaceship left or right over the heads of the dozy beasts, and use its tractor beam to rearrange them into coloured groups.

When four or more like-coloured animals are grouped in any combination of horizontal or vertical alignment, they vanish, causing any animals above them to drop down to lowest unoccupied space. If you fail to get rid of the animals before they reach the horizon, it’s Game Over.

Controlling the craft is simple - you need only concern yourself with moving left, right, and firing your beam. It’s pretty obvious what the mechanics are from the start, so there’s no real need to trouble yourself with the garbled tutorial text.

As the difficulty begins to ramp up, the number of creatures onscreen increases along with the number of colour groups. Things get trickier when you leave Africa and head to the South Pole, where you stop hassling elephants and hippos and start to prey on brightly coloured polar bears.

If you persevere, you'll find yourself stealing cows in America. Whether you will choose to push through to the end is another matter.

Tile-wiping power-ups add a bit of spice, but otherwise this is the same schtick we’ve seen hundreds of times already, with nothing to distinguish it from its peers other than the daft premise.

You can spend the points you earn on skins for your ship, but the novelty is purely cosmetic. There are no extra modes to speak of, so the best thing you can do is focus on engineering the largest creature clusters for the biggest multipliers.

There's some fun to be had, but any thrills are tempered by the knowledge that everything this game attempts has been executed better elsewhere.