Ali the Penguin Review

Try saying this after a couple of beers: penguins pack a pop-culture punch. In recent years, animated movies like Madagascar, Happy Feet and Surf's Up have swamped the multiplexes like an oil slick in the Antarctic. It was inevitable that before long we'd see something similar on our phones and here it is: Ali the Penguin. Dare we p-p-p-pick it up and give it a play? [You'd better – Ed]

Ali is a special commando penguin – complete with helmet and a snowball bazooka – who's on a mission to recover a relic, the Golden Egg, that's sacred to his colony. Along with the hazardous Arctic terrain, hostile locals (including polar bears with guns and storks carrying weights) are all blocking his path. Ali thus has to navigate a series of platforms and put these enemies on ice, whilst also collecting any bonus items he finds along the way.

In terms of graphics, the game looks quite pretty, with a blue and white colour scheme for the frozen landscape. It's a cartoon style in the mode of films like Ice Age and the aforementioned Happy Feet, and it's a good fit for the game's genre. The music is similarly acceptable, with a jolly theme tune and rudimentary sound effects for jumping and shooting. So far, so promising.

Where Ali takes a bit of a tumble, however, is with regards to the controls. Perhaps it's because he's got flippers for feet, but it's nigh impossible to control the character with any precision. Often, you'll find yourself attempting to make the same ruddy platform over and over again.

But then, Ali is similarly unresponsive when trying to dodge enemy projectiles. Enemies seem to fire at random, and they'll usually do it off-screen when they can't be seen. Unless players have ultra-quick reflexes, they have next to no chance of avoiding them.

The developer has tried to disguise the game's shortcomings by offering downloadable freebies like ringtones and screensavers. There's also an interactive leaderboard where you can receive the latest high-scores from other players on your mobile. All of this is good solid material to give the game some longevity, but if the core product isn't up to snuff then the additional features are about as much use as a fridge in an igloo.

It's a popular urban legend that Inuit have hundreds of different words for "snow", and we're racking our brains to find just a handful of different words for "flawed", because, unfortunately, that's what this game is. Ultimately, our minds failed us, so let's just call it flawed and leave it at that.