Drop the Chicken

If there’s one thing that Cut the Rope and its ilk prove, it's that doing a simple concept well can produce just as rewarding a game as anything with a seven-figure digit attached to the production cost.

Drop the Chicken is an admirable attempt to replicate this winning formula, putting the slightest of spins on its blatantly obvious inspiration, shifting the emphasis to more trial and error placement than reaction-based cutting.

The problem is that when its put up against Chillingo and ZeptoLab’s blockbuster, it drops the ball in pretty much every area.

Your task in Drop the Chicken is to re-route the power couplings of an X5 space flyer before the abductor semi-implodes the time line flux field. Only joking - you just drop a chicken.

Each level pits a range of bombs between you and your feathery friend's ultimate goal: his nest. Should he strike any of these on his descent or fall off the sides of the screen, it’s back to the starting platform.

To help you get him past these obstacles and safely into his home are a series of movable objects that can be dragged around the screen, ranging from bouncy pads and solid wooden planks to more elaborate contraptions such as fans and balloons.

There’s also a number of flies buzzing around each stage, which mirror Cut the Rope’s stars, adding to your final ranking at the end of the level.

Alas, there are a few glaring problems with this setup, the first being that the gameplay doesn’t really lend itself well to the get-three-stars-to-master-the-stage setup.

It’s quite hard to judge exactly how far your bird will bounce (or if the fans will actually do anything at all, half the time) and as a result there seems to be an undue amount of punishment for not getting things exactly right at the first or second time of asking.

This will matter little if you don’t care about conquering everything in the game - however, the odd ability for your bird to get caught in infinite loops or trapped within objects proves to be a far more significant annoyance.

This lack of technical sheen feels odd, because the presentation initially looks rather good - your chicken is a likable character, if not as cute as Om Nom.

The pacing of the puzzles is strong as well, easing you into the game’s concepts at a good rate. Still, the construction of some of the stages can be quite tricky to fathom. Also hard to fathom is why you’d pick Drop the Chicken over its more illustrious cousin.

While it does provide some strong level design and looks the part, the annoying scoring, unpolished gameplay, and baffling collision detection means it’ll likely be dropped from your device sooner than you think.