iPhone Review: Picnic Panic

Publisher/Developer: Assyria
Genre: Squish Em up
Price: $0.99
Acquired: Review Copy Provided
Verdict: The foundations are there for a great game, just a few niggling flaws
Pros: Good, mindless fun. Perfect for pick up and play goodness.
Cons: Not many levels on offer. No ‘resume play’ option.

Within seconds, Picnic Panic reminded me of the likes of Flight Control — in my book this is a very good sign. Picnic Panic isn’t as refined yet but what is there forms a great foundation for hopefully a fantastic budget game in the future.

The concept is simple: there are bugs coming to eat your picnic food and you have to squish them before they eat everything. This is easily done by tapping the screen where they are. There are a wide variety of bugs to squash, each with their own unique features. Some are easily killed with one touch; others require multiple taps of the finger, while some are annoyingly fast at getting away. Much like a Tower Defence game, things quickly become a matter of prioritising. There ends up being so many different bugs coming towards your food that it’s essential that you react quickly and focus on the more dangerous bugs such as the annoyingly fast wasps.

As simple as this may sound, this is pretty much Picnic Panic to a tee. Fortunately though it is good fun. It’s satisfying squishing the various bugs and trying to beat your previous high score. Picnic Panic is somewhat rough around the edges, though. It’s a perfect game to drop in and out of in 5-10 minute bursts but this is where one of the real downsides to the title comes into play, there’s no way to resume play. Quit out of the game to answer a call or SMS for example, and you can’t return later. It’s annoying and something I hope will be swiftly rectified in future updates. Also things get rather hard quickly. The fact you can’t squish more than one bug at once makes things even trickier and it feels like the only way you can get big high scores is to have lightening fast reflexes. The ability to be able to touch a few different bugs at a time would certainly have evened this difficulty spike out a bit.

Overall Picnic Panic is flawed but still enjoyable. At times it does feel a little bit like a Work In Progress project with quite limited levels on offer and the much needed ‘Resume Play’ facility, but what is there is good fun and worth a look at its low price of 99c.