Adult Swim games sure do seem to be on a roll when it comes to goofy animal games. Their incredible browser game Robot Unicorn Attack is one of the most simple pleasures you can find online, and their new universal iOS game Extinction Squad is just as enjoyable, if perhaps a bit less joyfully bizarre.
In Extinction Squad, you play as Charles Darwin (don't ask, I didn't). Your goal is to save endangered species—from dodos to gorillas to lions—who have apparently all become uncontrollably suicidal and are hell-bent on leaping off of a cliff to their doom. Why? Who knows. Why not!
The setup is very, very simple—bounce the animals from the trampoline off to the right-hand side of the screen. But simple though it may be, Extinction Squad is rewarding once you get in the zone. It feels a bit like Fruit Ninja, though instead of slicing things in half, you're moving a slider at the bottom and trying to catch them. There are bombs like in Fruit Ninja as well, and if one hits your intrepid trampoline-holders, you'll get a game over and have to start again.
Extinction Squad does feature some in-app-purchasing nonsense, even though it costs $0.99 to buy it initially—that's a bit annoying, but the first couple of levels are actually fun enough that there's no real push to unlock the later levels unless you really want to. And of course, if you play for long enough, you can unlock everything without paying any more.
Feel is an important part of a game like this, and Extinction Squad had a great feel to it. It's chunky and appealing-looking, and the music ain't half bad either. It's very much the kind of game that you'll want to whip out to kill a few minutes on the bus, but as with Robot Unicorn Attack, it also has the potential to become something of a pocket-sized obsession.
It's really too bad we couldn't get any Erasure on the soundtrack, though.
Extinction Squad [$0.99, App Store]