Fat Chicken Review

Most tower defense games tend to be about, well, defending things. Even typical reverse tower defense games, although focused on attacking some kind of target, is still mostly quite formulaic. Fat Chicken isn’t one of those typical reverse tower defense games. It’s also probably not a game for avid vegetarians or vegans.

As the name eludes to, Fat Chicken is all about fattening up farm animals before sending them to slaughter. It sounds gruesome but it’s actually reasonably sanitized. You achieve this by placing down towers along the paths they take from farm to slaughterhouse. Such towers relate to things like feed, water, and those lovely antibiotics and hormones that are used to fatten things up artificially. Nice, huh?

Of course, skip over that theme and Fat Chicken is mostly just a fairly typical tower defense game of sorts. You place towers, choose to upgrade them at the right times, watch as the animals reach the slaughterhouse and you earn money, then repeat the process all over again. You can speed things up, bring extra waves in for more profit, and so forth. Elsewhere is an extensive upgrade system, ensuring you gradually improve as you go along.

Unfortunately, Fat Chicken is let down by somewhat awkward controls. Pinches and swipes should dictate the camera angles but they’re a bit flakey and don’t always work. It turns the experience into a slightly cumbersome one at times, not helped by the fact that once you do zoom in it’s obvious that Fat Chicken doesn’t look as delightful as it does from a distance.

Fat Chicken deserves plenty of credit for being thematically different from the rest, and it backs this up with the possibility of fending off protestors and UFOs later on in the game, but it's mostly quite a typical tower defense title. Genre enthusiasts won’t mind this, but it’s a shame there’s not more imagination in terms of the game’s actual content and mechanics.