Game Review: Chickens Can Dream

February 28, 2011 No Comments

In a very smart move by Amused Sloth. Late last week they released a free prelude to their much anticipated game ‘Chickens Can’t Fly’ called ‘Chickens Can Dream’.

As soon as you launch the game it just feels like an Xbox Live game (and it should be). The production and quality is just that good. The graphics and animations are crisp and precise. The sound also works with the game-type and lends a helping hand to the visuals. I can’t say enough about how this non- xbox live game looks and so far it is the best we have seen outside of the ‘inner circle’.

‘Chickens can dream’ take place in a paranoid laboratory where experiments take place involving chickens. Tilting your phone side to side guides your chicken through obstacles like circular saws, flame throwers, boots-on-a-stick, etc and eat corn to add to your score. You also get the chance to collect power-ups that either help you (slow time, corn magnet, indestructoid) or hinder you (confused controls, parasite worm, sausage, booze) on the way down.They serve to help you either survive longer or do some fact checking. That’s another thing I really enjoy about this game. It’s very multi-dimensional, its not only a race to the bottom or how much corn you can eat on the way down. There is also a checklist of facts to examine while your enjoying the game. You are playing as the chicken but on a higher level you are actually the scientist that is researching facts. Can chickens get wet? Do confused chickens die? Can a chicken hold it’s liquor? These ‘facts’ that you need to check work almost like achievements and dares you to figure out the many ways you can terminate the chicken.

The game also packs in a global leader-board to see how good or bad you really are and a good set of options. You can control not only the volume but the accelerometer and jump sensitivity. Another great feature to this game is that while your playing it shows a really faint shadow of your past life or 2. It helps you see where you went wrong on your last life. It works really well and it is a very original idea that I personally haven’t see implemented before.

There weren’t any problems I had with the game aside from the ones they already knew about

Difficulty balancing (fixed for V1.1, coming soon)
A tutorial (fixed for V1.1, coming soon)
Loading times on HTC HD7. We know this is an issue, and we have worked a lot on trying to sort this out. However, this only appears on this specific phone model. All other phones load fast. We’ll continue to investigate the issues with the HD7 and release an update when we have a solution

[smartads]

As you can see they are already working on these. One issue we have heard about though is the fact that some players have experienced the game crashing at certain points of the game. We haven’t run into this problem ourselves but we will let you know if we do.

This is a great game that by far exceeds my expectations of a free mobile game and would of gladly forked over a dollar or 2 if it wasn’t free.

[rating:4.5]