Panda Picnic

Pandas, as far as the Pocket Gamer crew are concerned, are good for eating bamboo and looking cute. Developer Fuzzycube Software has other ideas – they’re all about eating fruit and looking, well, a bit creepy.

Panda Picnic is a freemium match-three puzzler where you and an opponent take it in turns to connect fruit on a chequered blanket, watched over by the monochrome mammal of the title.

Your rival is either plucked from your Facebook friends list or randomly chosen by the game from all its online-enabled players. Or you can pass and play if you can find a willing participant. The fruit choice: orange

Before each turn you’ll need to spin a fruit machine to reveal the three fruits you’ll be playing with. If you’re not happy with the selection, you can spend any coins you’ve amassed through play (or purchased from the in-game shop) to spin again.

Once you’re in, you’ll need to catapult your selected fruit into play via a rubber band tied between a fork and spoon. All fruit is handily cut into discs for the sake of uniformity and easy matching.

Link three or more fruits of the same type and they’ll be deducted from your ‘needs’ list as well as disappearing from the blanket. Cash for kumquats Any further matches for fruit already ticked off translates to coins for the machine, and the same goes for any loose fruit a match may have dislodged from the pack.

A new line of fruit descends from the top when the display is looking barren to give you more to shoot at, and naturally the objective is to complete your list before your opponent.

It’s a perfectly decent idea, but the alarm bells start ringing as soon as you start the tutorial and you realise it’s on a website and not part of the download itself. And you’ll only discover you’ve lost a game when it appears in the Game Over list. Invisible touch

The wall around the edge of the play area is transparent, which can make it hard to gauge the angle you need to bounce a fruit off it. There’s a little too much luck involved, too. The more money you have, the better chance you have of a decent spin, thus handing the advantage to the big spenders.

In theory, there’s an element of strategy involved, with the need to prevent your opponent from making matches just as you set up some of your own. But because you’ve no idea what your opponent might spin it’s impossible to formulate any useful tactics. Basket case

It’s a shame, as there are some nice ideas here. Ignoring your hungry host, whose legs and eyes move as if controlled by some unseen puppet master, the presentation is clean,
crisp, and colourful. Power-ups add an element of surprise, with a special multi-coloured fruits that acts as wild cards, transforming instantly into the type they come into contact with, as well as a bomb, whose effects should be immediately obvious.

Otherwise, it’s all a tad lightweight. With no other game modes or options to speak of, it’s unlikely Panda Picnic will tear you away from the many superior turn-based multiplayer titles on iOS.