Swine Foo Fighting

Everyone’s heard of the rather nasty Swine Flu outbreak in the news so it was only ever going to be a matter of time until someone in bad taste created a bit of a comical game – Swine Foo Fighting.

This game is a bit of a spin off of the centipede or space invaders style arcade action genre. You start off with three lives (or should that be three pigs), but no red riding hood. The idea of the game is simply protecting your pigs from the waves of doctors and nurses who are running toward you. To do this you have a pig armed with ninja throwing stars (I can think of other things pigs would probably feel more at home throwing but none the less), it’s your mission to move from side to side and firing your unlimited ‘stars’ at the pesky health workers.

The controls are pretty straight forward, using the keypad buttons. To go left you press 4, to go right you press 6. Firing is the only mildly difficult thing to do for the following reason – you have three types of doctors. Male doctors with masks and hats – you must press 1 to hit them. Male doctors without hats you must press 2 to hit them. Whereas, the female nurses can only be hit when using your number 3 button.

To be honest the game seems a little confused to say the least, for example the game’s set in Mexico (where the Flu’s meant to have originated from) yet you’re using ninja throwing stars. Not detracting from the game, this is quite an enjoyable title and does get increasingly more and more challenging the longer you play and the more advanced you get in it.

For the initial first few levels, you would need to be either blindfolded or unable to tell the difference between the numbers to use against the advancing docs. In truth, for the first couple of levels I could use the wrong weapon and cycle my way through to the right one in good time. However, by level 5 or so the targets get quite fast and room for error does decrease considerably. It does get to a point where you’re lucky to be in the right position to hit the target, as your character is quite slow both moving sideways and at reloading between shots.

All in all then, this game is quite addictive and certainly for those who like a novel approach to the retro style arcade action games. With tongue firmly placed in cheek, this game offers some humour and light relief.

The only real drawback to this game is that it’s all the same thing throughout, there’s no cutaway mini-games to keep the action coming, just wave after wave of pesky doctors which get faster and faster with every level and there’s no real end in sight other than surviving as long as you can.

Rating 74%

Positives

Quite good graphics

Mildly entertaining and good distraction from whatever else you may be doing

Let’s you take some vengeance on doctors and nurses

Negatives

Progressively gets faster until there’s no point playing as there’s no way you can survive

No mini-games

Very repetitive which causes the humour and addictiveness to wear off quite quickly

The game froze quite a few times when I lost a piggy