While pigs do occasionally play the role of antagonist in the likes of Angry Birds and The Legend of Zelda, they’re not often cast as the protagonist of a video game.
Aporkalypse: Pigs of Doom seeks to change that.
While this Xperia Play edition doesn’t wholly absolve the sins of the previous Android version, it does a decent job of restoring the animal’s reputation.
Ham-fistedThe player controls the Four Pigs of the Aporkalypse - each with different abilities - as they plod their way through 30 levels of multi-layered grid-based puzzles collecting coins.
At its core, HandyGames's swine-filled puzzler contains one very simple aim: get all your pigs to their respective goals by shifting various bits of the environment around.
Naturally, there are plenty of obstacles in the porkers' path, including sealed doors, traps, and enemy devil pigs out to steal your coins. Most of the time, however, you are simply presented with gaps to clear and blocks to push around.
In these regards, the most useful character at your disposal is Hunger Pig, who can swallow obstacles and blocks of straw, then spew them out elsewhere - to hold down switches or create a makeshift bridge, for example.
At any point in proceedings, mind, you can switch to the other hogs: War Pig can kill the little devils by firing his cannon, Pest Pig can possess enemies with his farts (no, really) and use them to plug gaps, while Death Pig can metamorphose into a spirit and float over clouds or through otherwise inaccessible areas.
In rindsightThankfully, a lot of the stop-start movement problems you encounter in Aporkalypse: Pigs of Doom on Android touchscreens (you have to swipe repeatedly to safely move anywhere, which gets annoying) are remedied by the Xperia Play’s slide-out D-pad.
Despite it feeling a lot more natural and comfortable, therefore, to move your pigs from place to place on Sony Ericsson's PlayStation Certified handset, a few nagging issues with the heroic truffle munchers remain.
For one thing, the puzzles are fairly bland. While they become slightly more stimulating and challenging later on, there’s not too much satisfaction to be had from getting your piggy chums to the finish lines.
The cumbersome switching between pigs and the sometimes confusing layout makes the solving of problems slow, even when the levels are intelligently designed.
Overall, Aporkalypse: Pigs of Doom on Xperia Play is definitely an improvement over the stock Android version - largely thanks to the Xperia Play's control scheme - but it still has some way to go to bring home the bacon.