Game Reviews

Kamikaze Pigs

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iOS
| Kamikaze Pigs
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Kamikaze Pigs
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iOS
| Kamikaze Pigs

I hate Kamikaze Pigs with a passion usually reserved for seal-clubbers and dubstep music, and I am now going to use 500 words to tell you why.

In this casual puzzle game, each level presents you with a swirling swarm of jackboot pig soldiers, who are either on foot, driving tanks, in trucks, flying planes, or piloting helicopters.

Your job is to fire one shot at one portion of the screen, causing any pigs in the area to explode. Hopefully, this will cause a chain reaction whereby all the pigs inadvertently kill each other.

So you might shoot a plane, which drops a bomb on a helicopter, which explodes into bits and showers debris onto a tank, which fires a shell at a soldier, who lobs a grenade at a truck. You get the idea.

The Thin Red Swine

At first, it all seems rather arbitrary. You can only really predict what will happen in the first few links of the ensuing chain reaction, and the only real strategy seems to involve waiting for a tank to face the right way, and starting your attack at the top of the screen so that the carnage flows down like a waterfall.

So you decide to give up, accept a pitiful one- or two-star score, and stumble onto the next stage. And then you'll unlock an upgrade.

These increase the damage that each pig does when it's destroyed, increasing the chances of continuing that chain reaction. You could make a chopper shed its rotor blades, which might hit another vehicle. You could make an artillery truck fire two rockets instead of one. You could make a foot soldier chuck a grenade in his death throes.

These upgrades make levels exponentially easier to finish, and if you go back to a previous stage with a few of these upgrades under your belt you'll often be able to get a good or even perfect score with just a random, thoughtless tap, anywhere on the screen.

Imagine going back to an old Angry Birds level, but now with an atomic bomb under your wing, and you've got the picture.

Hogs of War

So, Kamikaze Pigs quickly becomes a game about endlessly replaying previous levels as you sluggishly grind to earn enough money to buy the upgrades you desperately need to advance through the game.

Ultimately, getting a good score is not a triumph for your puzzle-solving or tactical acumen, but a triumph for wasted time and pig-headed determination.

Kamikaze Pigs is not so much a game as it is a joyless slog through an uninspiring upgrade menu, and - more than likely - a pathetic attempt to get you to spend real cash to expedite this tiresome process.

So, Kamikaze Pigs is basically a free to play game in everything but the price. It is a boring, skill- and strategy-free chore, that will wring you of either your free time or your spare cash until you say enough is enough and mercifully drown your poor iPhone in a bucket of icy water.

Kamikaze Pigs

A dull, shockingly cynical waste of time, which is all about grinding for upgrades, and almost nothing about skill or strategy
Score
Mark Brown
Mark Brown
Mark Brown is editor at large of Pocket Gamer