Bouncy Chicken is a physics puzzler, of sorts, and it comes from Austrian coders YeTa Games. It’s published by eastasiasoft too so you can expect two versions of the game (PS4 and PS5) and a couple of reasonably easy Platinum trophies. We don’t usually mention the trophy situation that early on but, as you’ll see, when it comes to Bouncy Chicken, there’s not much else to talk about.
In the game, you play as the titular chicken. Each of the game’s 90 stages are single screen affairs and in them you’ll find just three things: your chicken, some cobs of corn and a few obstacles. Your job is to collect the corn and to do that all you need to do is pick a direction and fire yourself off. At that point your chicken will bounce off any walls and obstacles and hopefully hit a cob or two.
To pass a level, all you need to do is collect the cobs within the moves limit and, in some ways, it’s kind of like a very, very bland version of Peggle. Well, that’s us being kind because honestly we’ve described pretty much everything already. Even over 90 stages, there’s almost zero variation. You’ll get some spinning obstacles, some extra-bouncy walls and, late on, some teleporters but none of it really makes any difference at all.
That said, it’s not a complete walk in the park either. Some levels will create a little bit of frustration and even foster mild addictive qualities as you brute force your way through with multiple attempts. It’s never too tricky or particularly interesting, but it’s reasonably playable and the slight challenge is the best aspect of the game. You’ll still finish the game in a single lazy afternoon session though.
But even with a concept this simple, there’s still an issue. The game’s perspective is slightly forced and that makes angling your shots a little trickier than it needs to be. It’s far from game-breaking but with something this basic, you’d think that they’d at least get the core of the gameplay perfect.
And when you add to that visuals that look, at best, like a mobile game from 2006 and with no backdrop changes across so many stages, it honestly feels like YeTa banged this one out in a few days. There’s so little going on, that we’re sort of forced to make this our shortest review ever.
+ Occasionally challenging
- Looks like an ugly 2006 mobile game