Greedy Pigs

Given that Greedy Pigs's icon bears a passing resemblance to some egg-stealing farm animals from another well-known game, I wasn't expecting it to break any new ground when I loaded it up for the first time.

How wrong I was.

Net mobile's Greedy Pigs not only covers the basics of tower defence admirably, but it also manages to shake up the genre in unexpected but welcome ways.

As in HandyGames’s Guns ‘n’ Glory, your defenders are allowed to move in Greedy Pigs. The enemies still follow pre-determined paths, but with a cap on the number of defenders you can place on each level, you'll need to push your units around to cover as much ground as possible. This leads to some exciting 'last line of defence' chase moments.

All of that is nicely aided by the tight controls, which allow you to touch and drag a unit to guide them around. You rarely get the wrong guy, and the graphics are sharp enough to ensure you're never left frustrated.

Unlike many of its contemporaries in the tower defence genre, Greedy Pigs introduces RPG elements into proceedings. While other games will allow you to upgrade your units with the right amount of money, Greedy Pigs ties upgrades to the number of kills made, as well.

If a soldier isn't pulling his weight, he's not going to get better.

There are a couple of downsides, however: the first is that it's quite easy. There's not much of a penalty for letting the assorted woodland critters hit your beer barrels.

The barrels have 200 hit points, and these can be repaired at any time if you have the funds. The chances are that if there are enough enemies to break through, you'll have enough money to make repairs.

The game will only award you top marks for each stage if you don't allow enemies to break through very often, but you can still blitz through many a level with the liberal use of the repair function.

The second issue with Greedy Pigs it its length. The game contains three sections with six levels each, and this combined with the low difficulty ensures you can shoot through it pretty quickly.

Still, there's a Survival mode on top of the story, and the game does sit at the cheaper end of the Android spectrum. In a marketplace crowded with 'me-too' games, Greedy Pigs tries something a little more unusual, and for the most part pulls it off.