Gulp!

Of all the so called seven deadly sins, none gets more of a workout in video games than gluttony.

Well, okay, maybe wrath gets a look in. But otherwise, frantically shoving foodstuffs down your character’s neck is a surprisingly common digital pastime.

OrangePixel’s latest Android game Gulp! is a case in point. Taking command of a cute little birdy fella, your sole aim is to gobble up as many enemies as you can using your incredibly long tongue.

Light bite

This is very simple to achieve. Holding your Android phone normally, you send birdy left and right by tilting the handset accordingly. As various baddies drop from the sky, you can shoot out your tongue diagonally to gobble them up by touching the screen on the appropriate side of your character.

A brief tap will send your tongue out a short way, with a prolonged hold extending it further. If you miss any of the baddies, they’ll take out a section of the floor, making things a little more precarious from that point on.

The ultimate aim is to collect enough coins from gobbled enemies to buy passage to the next level. There’s also the incentive of boosting your score by stringing together successful gobble combos.

Unfortunately, stringing multiple gobbles together can be tough thanks to a quirk in the controls. The 'press and hold' technique for extending your tongue seems a little twitchy, and I often found myself (initially, at least) sending a second tongue-lashing out inadvertently after the intended one, resulting in the end of my combo.

A touch of indigestion

That’s not the only unpalatable element, either, as the collision detection on birdy is a little harsh. Direct contact with an enemy means game over – fair enough – but it felt as if we were snuffing it a fraction too early, just prior to actual contact.

There’s also the lingering feeling that such a simple game would have benefited from a slightly more involved chaining system – perhaps rewarding more points according to the distance of the target, or for grabbing multiple targets in one go.

Still, there aren’t many 0.99 Euro games on the Android Market that can claim to offer as polished an experience as Gulp!, with achievements and global high-score tables – not to mention OrangePixel’s usual excellent presentation – lending the game a distinctly premium feel.

Gulp!’s rough edges and extreme simplicity mean that it’s not going to fill you up for long. If you fancy a sweet gaming snack in between meals, though, you could swallow a lot worse.