iPad Review: Cannibal Bunnies

Lunar New Year 2011, the Year of the Rabbit conjures images of rabbits and good fortune in my mind. Sadly, such is not the case with Cannibal Bunnies. In Cannibal Bunnies, it’s a bunny-eat-bunny world. The world in Cannibal Bunnies has been over-run by — you guessed it…Cannibal Bunnies! The domination of the Cannibal Bunnies has left many cute, pink bunnies poor and defenseless. In this game, it’s up to you to protect the pink bunnies.

Cannibal Bunnies features 45 levels spread in three different worlds and one bonus experts level. Gameplay is pretty straight forward. Touch and drag bunnies into bunny cages to protect them from falling to their death or from getting eaten by Cannibal Bunnies. As simple as that sounds, each cage actually has a set limit on how many bunnies can be stored. Go over this limit and the cage of bunnies falls to an unfortunate death. Then there’s the Cannibal Bunnies and infection-causing carrots. Both serve as obstacles keeping you from meeting the captured bunnies goal that needs to be met before proceeding to the next level. Other obstacles I’ve stumbled across came in the form of Cannibal Bunnies pushing boulders to roll over and squash the pink bunnies.

With all the game’s intended obstacles, there’s also a few unintended obstacles due to user interface issues. These issues made Cannibal Bunnies a frustrating game to play even when set on ‘Easy.’ The game does include a variety of difficulty settings, but even after the most recent update to address difficulty, the UI issues have since remained. The most frustrating would be the lack of ability to zoom out. You can tap in areas for a better view, but the lack of zoom ability makes this game incredibly frantic since your view of the action is incredibly limited while you’re supposed to sequester little bunnies that lack a sense of danger and will fall off of cliffs or get eaten by Cannibal Bunnies. Employing a zoom function via a two finger tap would work wonders for this game and make it less frustrating.

Another issue I had with the UI is that the ’safe area’ of each cage was too small. If you’re not precise about where on the cage you drag your bunny to, your bunny will fall! One improvement for this, would be to make the ’safe area’ larger so you don’t spend time trying to be exact about where you deposit your bunny.

Cannibal Bunnies graphics were excellent — the bunnies are both cute and convincing characters. Sound and music were also great.

Overall, I really think the concept of this game is really fun, but there are still some UI issues that need to be addressed. Once addressed, I think this game could be fun and easy to recommend.

For more information or to purchase, head here.