As yesterday’s video preview proves, WPCentral’s Daniel Rubino is a big fan of Chickens Can’t Fly, this week’s Must Have Xbox Live game. The game is due out this Wednesday, and we’ve got some fresh details to tide you over till then.
Chickens Can’t Fly is the Xbox Live sequel to indie game Chickens Can Dream. Whereas a previous indie-to-Xbox Live sequel, IonBallEX, was basically just the original game with a new set of levels, Chickens Can’t Fly greatly expands on its predecessor. The entire Chickens Can Dream experience is still present in Can’t Fly, where it’s become Survival Mode. In Survival, players pilot a chicken through a randomly generated level until their lives run out, trying to pass as many checkpoints as possible along the way.
The bulk of Chickens Can’t Fly’s new content comes in the form of more than 50 individual levels, called Experiments. These short levels are ideal for playing on the go. Each one poses as an actual scientific experiment, with goals like seeing how many sausages the chicken can eat without dying, or whether it can survive eating bad corn. The variety of goals and challenges present in the Experiments is quite impressive. Depending on your score, you’ll earn a Bronze, Silver, or Gold rating for each level, too.
Experiment levels are divided up into five laboratories. Developer Amused Sloth has outlined the theme of each Lab (the first is a set of 8 tutorial levels):
- Butchery: avoid cleavers and the butcher, eat sausages and live on the edge!
- Cemetery: witches are chasing you, zombies await you and Hypno Chicken hypnotizes you!
- Military: trenches are not place for a Chicken. So Chicken gets some nukes and levels everything around it!
- Physics: all manner of deadly electrical machinery await Chicken and it’s clone. But Chicken has EMP!
Chickens Can’t Fly also features a Global Weekly Challenge mode. Run through the week’s level and see how your score stacks up on the global leaderboard (a rare feature among mobile Xbox Live games). You can replay the weekly challenge as many times as you like for better scores.
Amused Sloth has packed an impressive amount of content into a $2.99 title. The game includes 6 free ringtones from the start – no need to unlock them. That said, you would definitely get some strange looks if you used any of these ringtones. Perhaps more useful, avatar awards will come in a future update. Outside of the game itself, there’s even a free Windows 7 desktop theme (for computers, not Windows Phone) featuring Amused Sloth’s hapless heroes.
In this humble writer/ninja’s opinion, Chickens Can’t Fly will like win the love of Windows Phone gamers with its sense of humor, great tilt controls, and variety of levels. Pretty impressive considering it comes from a team of only five people. For more insight into Chickens Can’t Fly’s development, check out Amused Sloth’s latest blog entry. Looking to the future, the developers have informed WPCentral that they already have another Windows Phone project in the works. We’ll be sure to let you know as soon as they’re ready to share the details.
Chickens Can’t Fly debuts on Wednesday, February 15. It costs $2.99 – less than the price of a deluxe chicken sandwich at McDonald’s, and far less disappointing to boot!
