Full Review

I'm not the first person to point it out, but when did penguins become such a regular theme on the App Store? In any case, Greedy Penguins by Shamrock Games and Chillingo seemingly painted itself in to a corner by choosing to jump in to the 'cute, 3-star physics puzzler' arena and decided to go the whole-hog. Don't mistake this for another Cut the Rope though - while similar concepts are in play, timing your drops to get the right fish to the right penguin isn't as easy as you'd think.

As just mentioned, your goal is to feed the penguins on screen by matching them with an appropriately colored fish, being rewarded with ice-cream which is subsequently used to boost your final score by feeding it to one of a handful of unlockable 'friends'. See-saws, pits and other various hazards will test your ability to time 'dropping' the fish in to the world, with your final time and score determining whether or not you score the coveted 'three golden fish'.

While some levels are relatively easy, getting the perfect timing is much harder and unfortunately very necessary for progression. With only 36 golden fish per chapter being available and increments of 30 gold fish required to unlock said chapters, your leeway is quite low. Being further hindered by occasionally sluggish touch-controls only makes the option to purchase and unlock all available content sting even more.

Thankfully Greedy Penguins can't be accused of skimping on its presentation. Players are likely to be entertained by the quirky characters in the game as they sport a variety of animations including a stomach churning session of puking if they're fed the wrong fish. Solid progress through the game will also unlock additional animations for the 'friend' located on each level, though this is hard to play with when you have such tight cut-offs for collecting gold fish.

Sadly this isn't incentive enough to keep pushing your way through the content unless you're a huge fan of similar titles. While it's great to feel challenged by a game, there's less fun in being told you have the solution, just not the right solution to within a fraction of a second. As such it loses a lot of casual appeal and possibly the audience it was intended for.

App Store Info