Pass The Pigs

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, Pass the Pigs takes a peculiar turn-based game as it's foundation, coats it in a surreal RPG-ish shell with a wry script and throws pigs in hats into the mix just for the hell of it. Shall I explain? Probably for the best.

The ‘Classic Mode' has the player slamming oscillating plastic pigs against a table, hoping they'll land in a certain way to earn points. Get to a hundred points before your computer opponent and you've won!  Slam the pigs too hard, and you might get a ‘Pig Out' - and lose all the points you've accumulated. Knowing when to pass your go, and quit while you're ahead is key, as what initially seems like random luck, turns out to be a porky equivalent of a gamblers coin toss. It's a fun little distraction, one that's perfectly suited to mobile gaming. Games are quick, and with each milestone (i.e. 50 points in one toss) you're awarded special moves, extra levels and um... a new hat for your porker.

Things get even more bizarre in the story mode; ‘A Pig's Life', which has the player guide a trotter from piglet to old-age. Sadly this doesn't involve it rolling around in its faeces, before being slaughtered and served with stuffing. The Pig's Life mode instead sees the player making life-choices between love and money, amidst a sea of pig-puns; do you fancy being a selfish pig, or a magnanimous do-gooder?

Done badly, the plot-driven nature of A Pig's Life could make the whole package a tedious mess, yet a wry smile flickers under the surface of a surprisingly satirical storyline - at one point our intrepid pig creates ‘PigSpace', and has to choose between selling the website to evil billionaire ‘B.B. Wolf' or improving it. After choosing to greedily grabbing the money, we learn B.B. Wolf destroys the website's popularity by turning it into a "mess of advertisements." Very apt.

So we guide our precious pig along his life between idealism and individualism, intermittently playing the main Pass the Pigs game to collect either money or numerical love, and its strangely compulsive. Actually, its better than that, it's clever, simple and quick to delve into, and the myriad of bonus features holds a surprising amount of depth to an excellent little mobile game.