Mad Cows

At first glance Mad Cows looks like a cynical cash-in. It features a catapult, physics, and a variety of cartoon animals that do different things when you tap them. There's a star rating system, too.

But the game has an ace up its sleeve in the shape of asynchronous competitive multiplayer. And while it's not quite enough to lever it into the higher echelons of iOS society, it's still an awful lot of fun.

Cow-abunga

You fire your vengeance-seeking creatures by dragging back on a slingshot and you angle the trajectory of their flight by sliding your finger up and down.

There are a few key differences between Mad Cows and Angry Birds in other areas, though.

Firstly, you don't have a set number of critters to accomplish your task with, and they're never mixed together either. Instead you get ten levels with the cow, ten with the sheep, and so on.

Different animals do different things, acting as bombs, splitting into three, or just giving you extra points when you tap on them. Your targets are gnomes - some stood in rickety structures, others hidden in more solid surroundings.

Sheep and destroy

The single-player levels never quite exhibit the spark you find in other examples of the genre, and it won't take you much longer than a couple of hours to get three stars on each of the challenges the game presents you with.

The multiplayer, on the other hand, is particularly clever, with levels split into two identical sides and catapults in the middle. You're randomly allocated an animal at the start of your turn, and the player who scores the most points wins.

There isn't a huge number of levels to play through (the ability to build your own would make for a brilliant addition) but the ones that are included show a level of nous that isn't present in the single-player campaign.

Mad Cows is entertaining enough, and the lack of originality in the single-player is just about made up for in the multiplayer portion. With more content, and more ideas, this could have been something special.