Developer: Puppy Punch Productions
Price: $1.99
Version: 1.0
App Reviewed on: iPhone




Sometimes there are days when a gamer just wants to sit down for a few minutes, enjoy a small challenge, and then go about their day without worrying about complicated control schemes or if they made the last check point. Chicken Coup Remix HD fits this bill just nicely.
The game mechanic here is simple, just escort some chickens back to their coups by dragging them across the farm-yard. However there are two different hens that need to go into their appropriate houses as well as hungry foxes that try to come in for a quick snack. The game eases players in with a brief tutorial, but the first level quickly becomes a test of speedy collection skills and evaluating if saving one chicken is worth losing five others. Each stage has specific score requirements to beat while only ten chickens maybe lost over the course of playing the level. There are three bombs that maybe used to clear everything when things get too hectic. This is a great example of a simple game to pick up and play yet hard to conquer.
Each new setting starts nice and manageable but after a few moments it quickly fills up and becomes a pain to maintain. Sadly this is where two issues rear their ugly heads. The game would often drop chickens off at various places if I was moving my finger too quickly, thus forcing me to quickly work to collect the birds before it was too late. There are also stages where a fox would be hidden by trees, grab a chicken, and run off without ever showing up on the screen. This quickly becomes frustrating as the screen fills to the brim and managing the chaos becomes ever more essential. Hopefully these two annoyances receive some adjust in a patch down the road.
The game is aggravating and fun at the same time thanks to what seems like an easy task quickly escalates into a frenzy of herding chickens and foxes. Don’t let the cutesy setting fool you, this is a challenging game and obtaining three stars on every level is not an easy task. I wonder if Old McDonald had this much trouble.