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Daily iPhone App: Chickon
You might have already played Galcon, it's a solid realtime strategy game from the early days of the App Store, where you guided little ships from planet to planet, eventually swarming over all of the planets in a certain galaxy. That game was fun, but it was a little more abstract than anything else, so creator Phil Hassey has decided to tweak the formula for just a little bit more fun with Chickon, a new free-to-play app on the store. Chickon, as you might imagine, takes the Galcon formula and brings a much goofier battle of chickens vs. robots, with a fairly deep metagame to play through as well. This is much sillier than Galcon's abstract shapes were, but the gameplay is essentially the same. You need to direct your troops (in this case, chickens) around from nest to nest trying to beat out robots. And while Galcon (the Labs version especially) mixed up its gameplay with various AI multiplayer modes, Chickon is an experience built much more for singleplayer -- as a chicken, you need to wander an overworld, fighting your battles, collecting various objects and powerups, and then accomplishing certain goals in the ongoing battle of chicken vs. robot. That campaign does a great job of putting a little more structure on the Galcon experience, and even if you tried the original and didn't find a lot of longevity in it, Chickon's worth a look. Plus, it's completely free, in a universal version no less, and while prompts to purchase in-app items came up a few more times than I'd prefer, that's a small price to pay for a free game with lots of fun, colorful content (and likely more coming). Chickon is a great download that really builds on the ideas that Galcon laid out, even while transferring the setting over to a much more looney framework.
