ChickenEggs Review – Had enough of slashing fruits? Try tapping eggs instead

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By: Molio Apps

Version #: 1.1

Date Released: 2011-11-10

Developer: Lin Zhihmeng

Price: 0.99

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If you’re tired of slashing fruits into bits and pieces on your iOS device, you might want to take a gander at a recently released game called ChickenEggs. As you can easily guess from the name, ChickenEggs involves chickens and eggs. It’s not a game, though, that seeks to answer the age-old puzzle of which between the two came first. (Let’s just leave that boring task to scholars.) Rather, it’s a cute and entertaining game where you touch eggs to turn them into—what else?—chickens.

The general imperative is this: hatch eggs by tapping them. The eggs in ChickenEggs are designed like Easter eggs. They bear different patterns, from simple stripes to polka dots to arabesque filigrees, and each egg’s pattern corresponds to a certain number of points. It’s just a tad too convenient that there’s no pattern that indicates that an egg is a bad egg, that is, it could decrease your points by a considerable amount or even cause the game to be over when accidentally tapped.

What ChickenEggs does have in the way of a “bad egg” is a bomb, something it has in common with Fruit Ninja. When the bomb is tapped, it throbs for a few seconds and goes “Boom!” and the game is over. The pitch black bomb, although also having a rounded shape, is easily distinguishable amid the technicolor eggs and poses a challenge lesser in degree than if it were also a colored egg. Then again, the same can be said of Fruit Ninja and its bomb among fruits.

Aside from the myriad of eggs and the occasional diabolical bombs, three more tappable objects are encountered in the game. Two are variations of a clock. One clock has a plus sign, while the other has a minus sign. Naturally they concern time: the former increases it while the other does the opposite. ChickenEggs, by the way, is played under time pressure. At the top of the game screen are two bars, one serving as an indicator of the time left on the current level and the other for the number of egg points you much reach in the level before the time runs out. The game ends when the time bar becomes empty while the points bar is still filled. To aid you in earning more points more quickly, a treasure chest pops up once in a while. When tapped, the treasure chest releases a plethora of eggs on the screen and you’re free to go crazy tapping on them. Just be careful of any bomb or minus clock that tries to get in your way, especially since upon “game over” the game resets to the first level instead of preserving the highest level reached.

ChickenEggs is a universal app, so you can play it on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. Playing on your iPhone or iPod touch seems more ergonomically convenient than playing on the iPad, since either of the two small iOS devices can be easily grasped with both hands and easily tappable with both thumbs. However, one advantage of playing on the iPad, apart from the larger game screen, is the possibility of playing with your friends and family. Turns out ChickenEggs can be a multiplayer game, only it’s many players against time instead of the usual multiplayer setup of many players against one another.

A big part of what makes ChickenEggs engaging for playing, whether on your own or with others, is its colorful graphics. Everything, from the eggs to the barnyard environments, is rendered so vibrantly you’d think the game is adapted from an award-winning illustrated children’s book. There’s also the accompanying music, which is rather amusing and never annoying and can also be your cue to tap frantically every time a treasure chest is tapped and lots of eggs fill the screen, practically begging to be turned into—what else?—chickens.