Developer/Publisher: Mediatonic Ltd
Genre: Picnic Defense Simulator
Price: $0.99 (limited time)
Verdict: Fun, cute, and challenging. Buy it and you will love it.
Pros: Well thought out game play and great design
Cons: Repetitive music and badly placed English translation of text.

Imagine a mix between a Japanese game show and a artist’s imagination gone wild. If you can’t, well, don’t worry. Must.Eat.Birds. will help flood your thoughts. The newly released game from Mediatonic, Must.Eat.Birds. (MEB) provides a plethora of out of thisworld art, music, and game play. Don’t let the cute and cuddly atmosphere fool you. For me the game was very challenging.

This game consists of a cute and lovable creature called a Nomster, parachuting birds, and cake.  You mix these crazy objects together and you obtain this unique game known as Must.Eat.Birds.  As a Nomster you are trying to protect your precious cake by consuming the birds parachuting from the sky. The object of the game is to protect your cake by hurling your character (Nomster) through the air using a sling shot device towards the birds that are raining down on your picnic. Sounds easy, right? That was my thought exactly, until I found myself unable to complete level 3 after 35 min of gaming. Adjusting to the control scheme was a little challenging initially. Your characters can ricochet off the sides of the screen, and they can also eat themselves to create an even larger Nomster. The larger your Nomster, the less accuracy needed in aiming. As one continuously fends off birds successfully the giant cake in the background grows taller and taller. Once the cake reaches maximum height, a characteristic Japanese game show voice bellows, “MAXIMUM BAKE”. Under normal circumstances your Nomster will fly off the screen or fall out the bottom, but in “Maximum Bake” mode, the Nomster will be able to stay within the confines of the area, allowing him to grow larger and larger. When this happens the birds are totally at your mercy to be gobbled up.

Now you are probably saying to yourself that this game does not sound too hard. All that is required is to sling your character into the birds and gather points in the process. However, as I should have pointed out at the start the challenge is in the strategy. Some of the defenses of these birds include “birds on the half shell” that make you hit the bird once to remove the shell and another time to eat it, and “hard boiled birds” that when hit split into two separate birds. This can cause some frustration in learning how to strategically launch your Nomster in a way to create the most effective amount of damage without allowing any birds to get to your cake. MEB offers two types of game play. The first is a “Mission” mode that includes nine different levels and nine different objectives to complete each level. The second is a “Challenge” mode that contains four challenges, and I could only unlock one. If you are better than me then three other challenges await you. The game also allows one to challenge a friend via email. Hopefully the developer will implement the push notification feature available in the 3.0 software in future releases.

The music can become a bit repetitive since the same song is played at every level. The interface is nice but I would like to see the black box that contains the English translation of the Japanese words better transitioned into the background. When I first picked up the game I had doubts about how well it would play. I can honestly say that it has quickly become the most addicting game I have played in a long time. I have to give some major kudos to the developers for a very clean and well rounded adventure.

In the end, if you can fight off the onslaught of birds, you will be able to have your cake and eat it too.