Game Reviews

Cock-a-Doodle, Inc.

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| Cock a Doodle, Inc
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Cock-a-Doodle, Inc.
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| Cock a Doodle, Inc

Sitting down at the table and tucking into a steak here, a chop there, it's very hard to visualise just what's happened in order to get it to your plate. Needless to say, if I had to slaughter each animal myself, I'd be a very thin chap indeed.

Cock-a-Doodle, Inc. comes with no such buffer. The game including every step of the modern day food chain from butcher to banquet. Playing as an aid to a struggling chain of fried chicken joints, you cast an eye over every cog in the wheel, keeping tabs on everything from the hatching of eggs to counter service.

Making sure everything runs smoothly is your job and, as you might expect, there are problems aplenty to keep you on your toes. Deciding whether to run marketing promotions to drum up interest is as important as making sure the eggs are hatching. Hiring and firing staff are likewise fundamental parts of hitting each mission's goals.

It's more than a simple time management test, though. In an almost unnoticed fashion, Minoraxis has cleverly stretched out the management aspect to include more fundamental choices. Rather than being a separate part of play, all these decisions are brilliantly assimilated into each level. Cock-a-Doodle, Inc. perfectly combines immediate, instinctive actions with long-range ones.

Using a simple menu system that lets you flip between the four main zones of play - the restaurants themselves, the chicken factories, the farms and the business HQ - each level throws you in at the deep end by running all the elements at once.

Making sure you've got enough egg farms to produce the chickens in the first place is your initial concern, but success comes from making sure you have a balance. It's important to use the money you earn as the days tick over to hire more staff if the counters are busy, build extra factories to fill demand, or run promotional campaigns if things are slow.

The game eases you into all of this, ensuring that you're schooled in how to perfect that monetary balance before it pushes you deeper and deeper into management.

Of course, no matter how efficient an operation you run you can't prevent problems from arising. Running out of bird feed in the factories, used oil overflowing in the kitchens, staff dozing off or falling out with customers - all are easily fixed, but they place demands on your time nonetheless.

As a result, you can't really take your eyes off Cock a Doodle, Inc.. As a pure time management sim, it's in no way as demanding as Diner Dash or Build-a-Lot, but it succeeds by incorporating some more serious decisions in the mix and building on the kind of goal-based-plot Fruit Juice Tycoon mastered. It might not be quite as frenetic as some of its rivals, but it's just as savoury in the long run.

Cock-a-Doodle, Inc.

Cock a Doodle, Inc. is more of a thinker's time management sim than a pure touch fest, but it's a far deeper title as a result
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Keith Andrew
Keith Andrew
With a fine eye for detail, Keith Andrew is fuelled by strong coffee, Kylie Minogue and the shapely curve of a san serif font. He's also Pocket Gamer's resident football gaming expert and, thanks to his work on PG.biz, monitors the market share of all mobile OSes on a daily basis.