I never reviewed Adventure Capitalist but boy, did I put a lot of time into that game. It started when I met up with some friends of ours when we were on holiday and one of them kept whipping their phone out every so often to check up on their progress. I had avoided the game up until that point but, with time to kill between things, I installed it and instantly fell prey to the clicker genre. So it was that every spare moment was filled with me spinning it up, checking on my progress and buying upgrades so I could reach that next level. I’ve since then avoided everything to do with the genre, not wanting to fall into that same trap once again. Cheeky Chooks however managed to fly under the radar, seemingly being a farm management simulator on first blush but is really a clicker at heart. Thankfully it’s one that can be completed in a reasonable amount of time and is completely free of microtransactions. With it being free to play I’m not quite sure what Trilum Studio’s play is here, but it’s at least a fun distraction whilst we’re in the middle of a lul in big name releases.
The premise of the game is simple: you’re an aspiring chicken farmer with a small space to start pursuing your dream of raising chickens. You’ll get a set amount of cash to start you off and you’ll build out your farm from there. Once you’ve exhausted your initial cash reserves though you’ll need to rely on selling eggs to make enough money to upgrade your farm. The mechanics follow the usual affair, your base income determined by the number of chooks with multipliers for “egg quality” that come from various sources like rare chooks or buildings that provide a small benefit. This has to be balanced with the chooks’ happiness, so you’ll also have to provide them with various items to ensure that they can happily lay eggs in your little chook pen.
Cheeky Chooks is visually quite simple with most models being highly stylized, devoid of textures and utilizing a very simple muted colour scheme. That simplicity flows through into the menu systems and other UI elements as well, having an almost childlike feel to them. The sound track and foley work is equally simple as well, giving the whole game a very minimalistic feel. Overall it’s quite nice and given that I feel like the game is designed to either be played in short bursts or left on in the background the visuals fit that idea well.
The game starts off with a pretty decent tutorial, walking you through the main mechanics before setting you off on your own. There’s a list of missions for you to do, most of which will help in pushing the farm towards the next level. Whilst you can likely progress without achieving all of them you’ll likely hit most of them by default and others you’ll want to get anyway in order to get certain achievements or just make your life a little easier. Annoyingly the Legends missions will always be highlighted after a certain point and, unfortunately, there’s no way to get rid of it since it’s tied to a specific event that has since passed.
Certain missions are pretty pointless to overall progression though, like the one requiring you to max out the level on a certain number of buildings. As you can see from my nearly completed farm below achieving those meant spamming lots of low level structures so that they could be upgraded cheaply. The game does increase the cost of each subsequent structure as you place them but the upgrade costs remain the same regardless of how many are placed. Sure, if you were truly min/maxing, I could see reasons for using the other buildings in order to jack up the egg quality but for the most part that doesn’t seem necessary. I think I could’ve completed the game in half the amount of time I played if I hadn’t stayed logged in, having the game on in the background whilst I watched videos on my second monitor.
The game was developed in collaboration with the RPSCA to be an educational tool for kids, teachers and parents which is a commendable feat. In that regard it succeed for the most part although nothing can replicate the true horror that is cleaning out a chook cage. That also explains why it’s a free to play game that’s devoid of microtransactions, something which is usually par for the course for these kinds of games. It’s also not an endless game either (although you can play for as long as you want) and given that they’ve only had a single event so far there’s no much reason to come back once you’ve blasted through all the achievements. Of course if you just like ambient clucking in the background and seeing numbers go up then you might get more out of it than I did.
Cheeky Chooks is a simple, straightforward game that many will be able to find several hours of enjoyment in. Whilst it is most definitely a clicker game the more nefarious mechanics that are typical in the genre are nowhere to be found. Instead what you have is a light-hearted take on what it’s like to raise chickens, something which hopefully will have an impression on those who play it. If you just want something simple to pass the time then there’s really not much reason to not give Cheeky Chooks a go.
Rating: 8.0/10
Cheeky Chooks is available on Android and PC right now for free. Game was played on the PC with a total of 5 hours playtime and 100% of the achievements unlocked.
