Thank you Relevant Games for sending us this game to review!

Fat Chicken is a reverse tower defense game where you must construct towers to keep your livestock alive long enough to make it to the slaughter house.  Your income is earned by the pound so you want to have the fattest chickens, pigs, and cows possible.  As you progress in the game you will earn promotions and get the attention of protesters who do not approve of the growth hormones, antibiotics and genetic mutation techniques.

At first you start off with the basics like food, water, and growth hormone towers.  Each of the twenty-six levels gives you some starting money or “murderbux” as it is referred to in this game.  The amount given is never enough so you’ll have to place your towers sparingly.  Fortunately, when you’re dealing with multiple animal pens, only one activates at a time enabling you to accumulate money to set up towers in the other areas.  

You can take as much time as you need to set up before the first wave.  Once you start the waves of animals, you can adjust the speed but not pause it completely.  The speed ranges from .5 to 4X; I wish it could go even faster than that at times.    For subsequent waves there is a monetary bonus if you release them early.  As long as your turrets are good to go, this free money is hard to refuse.

If you pump your animals with too much food or growth hormones, they may explode.  If that happens, you can hire a worker to collect the meat before it goes rotten.  Any meat they collect will still go towards your pounds of meat goal.  Every level has a minimum weight goal that has to be achieved to collect one star and move on.  Two stars can be earned by collecting even more meat and to obtain three stars you’ll need even more weight, but there is often a restriction thrown in like a limited number of towers, hired help, or animal casualties.  

Besides the meat cleaner-uppers you can hire cattle prodders to move your animals along faster.  They are required if there is a long distance between feeding and watering stations.  Security guards will also be needed to fend off protesters from tampering with your equipment.  Some levels will have aliens that like to abduct cows and you’ll need anti-aircraft towers to prevent them from succeeding.

As you can see, this is a pretty silly game.  To up the ante, there are genetic mutation towers that let your animals sprout more limbs and heads to increase their weight of salable meat.  This game promotes greed over the animal and human consumer’s health. There are various Steam achievements for completing levels, earning money, taking out aliens, and protester drones.  

While Fat Chicken is relatively family friendly, it is a bit challenging at times with the limited amount of funds given.  You can replay levels to earn more stars and gold for various upgrades and power-ups.  Stars are used to upgrade your equipment and hired worker capabilities.  Gold can buy you heroes and power ups.  Heroes often offer advantages like animals gaining more weight and faster or reproducing more often.  The problem with heroes is that they often come with a negative side effect so you have to pick your battles wisely.  Powers like animal duplicators, fat bombs, meat and money bags can be purchased with in-game money and are often handy in a pinch.  I used the money bags often and the meat bags came in handy to bump my weight amount to the next star’s tier in the last seconds of the level.

The colorful and cartoony graphics are cute and I like how all of the animals are cube like in appearance.  While they can explode into meat cutlets, you don’t see what happens to them after they enter the slaughter house.  

The twangy country background music was fitting, but not my cup of tea.  You can give it a listen and buy it for $5 here. The animal sound effects were fitting and sounded good though.  

The asking price of $9.99 is reasonable.  I put in about five hours before beating it.  If you’re a perfectionist there is some replay value in going back and earning three stars on every level or unlocking all of the twenty possible Steam achievements.  I have unlocked twelve of them.  I enjoyed this unique twist on the Tower Defense genre and I look forward to PETA’s response to it.