The Penguin Menace

It's not like we need the plots of our mobile games to be penned by David Mamet in order to deem them worthy of praise, and you can call us old-fashioned if you like, but isn't it customary to offer at least a sentence worth of explanation for the sort of bizarre concepts that appear in many mobile games?

Take The Penguin Menace, for example: a very competent platform puzzler with a great visual style, likeable characters and plenty of fun to boot. All great, but it throws you headlong into a gaming situation where you're expected to just accept, sans explanation, that you're a nameless yellow chicken bent on thwarting the attempts of evil penguins to crush metal scraps in a big machine with only a nameless worm sidekick, whom you can use as a whip and grappling hook for help.

Putting aside the fact that chickens and worms are mortal enemies, it's baffling that the evil penguins' motives are never satisfactorily explained. They might just be lowly workers totally ignorant about what they are building; perhaps the owner of the factory in which they're toiling recognized the benefits of cheap penguin labour. After all, most penguins aren't unionised.

Still, enough of our moaning because The Penguin Menace gets the important bits right.

You start at one end of a level set in a factory scattered with platforms and penguins. All the while there are chunks of scrap metal working their way through the stage to a scrapping machine via the various conveyor belts.

Elsewhere in the playfield is a wooden box that you can push into the scrapping machine to break it, ceasing the production line. In each level there's a certain quantity of scrap metal pieces set to make their way to the scrapper and the idea is to sabotage the machine as quickly as possible. Each time you destroy a scrapping device you have only a short time to make it to the exit in order to complete the stage. Any scraps that don't make it to the scrapper are multiplied as a point bonus.

You can also earn points for killing the evil penguins with your worm whip, which comes in handy for swinging from certain points in the levels when there are no nearby springs to propel you to the different platforms. The worm also acts as your guide, explaining any new developments to the gameplay (but doesn't say a word about why you are in such a strange situation).

We should mention the visuals and presentation are rather special, with a real cartoon charm that speaks of effort and a sense of humour on the developer's part.

At a mere 12 stages it isn't going to keep you playing for long, despite the considerable challenge that sets in about half way through, but The Penguin Menace is still a solid platform puzzler with lovely presentation and enough fun to warrant the asking price.