Game Reviews

Gnu Revenge

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iOS
| Gnu Revenge
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Gnu Revenge
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iOS
| Gnu Revenge

Rovio has a lot to answer for. Ever since Angry Birds catapulted onto the App Store, every in-game animal has had to be on a violent mission of retribution and retrieval in a cartoon world, usually governed by physics.

Gnu Revenge is the latest in that long line. It's an imitator with a few twists and ideas of its own, but which lacks the energetic spark of its avian forebears and falls victim to some uninspired design, repetitive gameplay, and lacklustre visuals.

Sent jet-packing

You play as the titular wronged wildebeest. Your friends have been stolen by space-faring crocodiles and it's up to you to use your jet pack and the gravitational pull of various stellar objects to liberate your allies and smash the evil crocs back to whichever swamp they blasted off from.

Rather than slinging or catapulting your gnu, the jet pack lets you boost and burn whenever you see fit. The method gives you a modicum more control, and makes for some interesting slingshot moves as you try and collect the three stricken creatures on every level.

You can progress without them by butting the gloating crocodile, but gnus unlock stages and give your points score a boost too.

The levels are brief, but there's little of the experimentation that other examples of the genre offer. There's one right way to go about things, and until you figure out what that is you'll be crashing into planets and drifting forlornly off into space.

I gnu this would happen

Whereas Angry Birds Space - Rovio's recent jaunt into the depths of the galaxy - offered plenty of variety, here each level feels like a slightly tweaked version of the last. New obstacles are added, like gaseous vents and orbiting asteroids, but they're too few and far between.

Gnu Revenge isn't a bad game - it just rests on its laurels far too soon, leaving you picking through bland, annoyingly difficult quasi-puzzles. There's fun to be had here, and the jet pack poses some tricky challenges, but too often it's content to sit back and drift rather than forging forward with its own concepts.

Gnu Revenge

Occasionally intriguing, but never as much as it wants to be, Gnu Revenge offers a reasonably entertaining experience for a while, but soon dawdles off into repetition
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.