Picnic Panic – Review
By App Type: Uncategorized
Our rating: 
By: Assyria Game Studio
Version #: 1.0 (iPhone OS 3.0 Tested)
Date Released: 2009-12-01
Developer:
Price: 0.99
User Rating:
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If you’ve ever been to a park for a nice picnic on a breezy weekend afternoon only to find your food raided by a bunch of bugs, well you’re one hapless guy. ‘Cause, thankfully, I haven’t. But whether you’ve been to a similar situation or not, Picnic Panic, a touch-based iPhone game, gives you the chance to defend the contents of your picnic basket from invading insects by letting you use the iPhone’s touchscreen to swat and kill them on the spot.
Picnic Panic features a brightly colored set-up consisting of various food items typically found in a picnic basket. You got your pies, your hard-boiled eggs, your cookies and your fruits, among others, neatly laid upon the cursory checkered blanket. And then the bugs start coming. You got your unusually large flies, your army of ants, your bees, and other creepy crawlies, including a giant and gooey caterpillar. Eliminating them off the face of your picnic blanket is pretty simple; all you need to do is tap on each. Some of the insects aren’t easily dealt with, though. For instance, you can’t swat bees while they’re airborne and caterpillars require more than one tap to kill them. You must get rid of the bugs before they consume the food, else the game be over.
The game starts on an initial level with relative ease, designed to give you a gist of the gameplay as well as introduce you to the game’s progressively panicky background music. The succeeding levels are locked until the preceding levels are accomplished by the player. An online leaderboard, courtesy of AGON, is also included, which entails having as high a score as you possibly can get by swatting bugs in quick succession to achieve bonus multipliers as well as by tapping on various points on the screen accurately.
I found the game pretty absorbing on my first try, but over time it became too repetitive. It’s one of those games that you intermittently come back to, and not one you’d be prone to playing more than a couple of times in a day, unless you particularly enjoy games of this sort or if you’ve ever been to a park for a nice picnic on a breezy weekend afternoon only to find your food raided by a bunch of bugs.
Quick Take
Value:Low.
Would I Buy Again:Probably not.
Learning Curve:Almost Zero.
Who Is It For:People who enjoy tapping frantically on their iPhones.
What I Like:The bright and enticing graphics. The quirky music.
What I Don't Like:Not enough challenges.
Final Statement:If you have a score to settle with bugs taking the lion's share of your picnic, then Picnic Panic is for you.
