The Birds: Evil Has Wings

Recently, a bunch of Chinese scientists were in the news for an experiment in which electrodes were implanted into the brains of pigeons, allowing their flight to be controlled remotely. We're not making this up, as you'll see if you click here.

Imagine the problems if this technology got into the wrong hands though. Someone could create flocks of deadly robo-birds, and subject the general population to unlimited beak-based terror. Or just give Nelson's Column a proper poo-pasting, of course.

Anyway, even evil cyber-crows wouldn't be as scary as the birds in legendary horror flick The Birds. Alfred Hitchcock's creepy classic is enough to put you off visiting any aviaries for life. Now it's been turned into a mobile game by Ojom, blending action and strategy in equal measure.

The plot follows the movie: your job is to rescue a town's citizens from hordes of evil black crows, by leading them to safety in a top-down adventure game.

It's simple at heart. You walk around the town, looking for citizens stuck in the open. When you reach them, click '5' to get them to follow, and lead them back to designated safety spots.

But of course, the birds have other ideas. They're dotted around the town, flying about in flocks, or simply pecking about on the floor, waiting for their next victim. Thankfully, there are three ways to stay out of their clutches.

Firstly, if you stay out of their 'awareness range' – indicated on the in-game radar display – they'll ignore you. And when they are in range, if you stay still, they won't bother you. We're not sure why this is the case, maybe they're like dinosaurs in that respect – they can't see you unless you move.

If they do give chase, you can leap into a phone booth or car boot to hide, or set off water hydrants or set fire to bins to distract them for a few seconds while you make your escape. Get it wrong, and you get pecked to death in suitably gruesome fashion.

The Birds is definitely a more cerebral type of action game, in that blindly running around town will soon see you killed off. You have to proceed slowly and cautiously, constantly watching the surrounding area for the birds (you can press '3' to pan the view, which helps).

Each level gives you a certain number of citizens to rescue, and you can play on Scary or Horror difficulty levels.

The Birds looks good too, with a strong cartoonish visual style that's very reminiscent of LEGO Star Wars. The crows have beady red eyes, giving them an impressive air of menace, considering they're just a few pixels in size. The graphics don't stretch your phone by any means, but they do have character.

For all its craft, though, The Birds falls down on the sheer frustration of playing it. All too often, one wrong move means you're dead, especially if you're stuck out in the open not in easy reach of a car or phone booth. Once you have a flock of birds pecking at you, your character slows down so much that you usually have no chance.

Some gamers might relish the way this reduces the gameplay to a trial-and-error mechanic, but the game would have benefited from a more forgiving difficulty level, giving you more chance of outrunning the birds.

The sound effects aren't much to write home about either, with suitably portentious theme music giving way to sparse sound effects during the game itself.

The Birds certainly isn't your bog-standard movie game. Ojom has clearly put a lot of thought into the gameplay and visuals to ensure it's not just the standard action title you might have expected, and the focus on avoiding and/or distracting the birds fits well with the original film.

But the unforgiving difficulty level means the game is too often just the wrong side of teeth-grindingly frustrating to play. If you relish a challenge, it's well worth a look, but if you've got a low patience level, the only thing taking flight will be your phone, through the nearest window.