Grow Away

Thanks to Twitter, we no longer need to throw rotten tomatoes to show our displeasure at a public figure’s poor performance.

Chillingo puts these unused projectiles to much better use in Grow Away, a delightfully moreish new casual time-waster for iOS.

A gang of enemy fiends is making its way to your base, ready to smash down your flimsy barriers and do whatever enemy fiends do when they get their own way.

In your defence you have a powerful slingshot and a limitless supply of anthropomorphic vegetables. And fruit, if you’re being pedantic.

While you need to have a decent aim in order to be a success in Grow Away, of equal importance are the unique abilities of each item of produce.

Tomatoes are your basic limitless attack, but their quantity is offset by their lack of punch. You can power them up by holding the slingshot back for an extended period, and by spending money to upgrade the slingshot itself. But your best bet is to combine their use with the rest of the veggies at your disposal.

As you progress through the game’s four worlds you’ll unlock a series of special attack vegetables that open out your attacking options. Each of them packs a unique punch, but takes a certain amount of time to regenerate (unlike the tomatoes).

There’s the Pumpkin, which can take out a tightly clustered gang of bog-standard enemies. There’s the Chilli, which is effectively a close-range flamethrower. Then there’s the mighty Potato, which steamrollers anything in its path.

Most are highly enjoyable to use, and even the ones that aren’t (we’re looking at you, Pea) can be dropped from your arsenal - you can only use a maximum of three at a time.

You unlock these extra slots by purchasing them with in-game currency.

In fact, there are two in-game currencies - coins and gems. Coins are easy to come by, and are often dropped by defeated enemies.

Gems occasionally crop up in the same way, or through the occasional shooting gallery-like bonus round, but really you need to make an in-app purchase to acquire any great number of them.

That’s a little irritating, given that the game isn’t free. Still, you can play it without making such a purchase (and we rarely used the additional power-ups) - it just won’t have as much tactical scope without all the extra elements.

Grow Away isn’t a massively deep or strategic game. Nor is it astonishingly well-constructed or particularly good-looking.

It’s just a bright and breezy casual game that you’ll find surprisingly difficult to put down. In other words it’s exactly the sort of mindless, tactile fun that lobbing vegetables around should be.