Arguably starting a trend of bird-based video games (see Mighty Goose for another), here we have Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken. It launched back in 2012.

From indie team Ratloop Asia, it’s a game about annihilating an evil penguin regime. It’s all really silly and steeped in macho ’80s cinematic action hero lore, which we enjoyed a great deal (not least as the thing is only £4).

Cluck Your Way to Victory in Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken

Okay, you can get this thing on Steam, PS3/4, Vita… that’s about it. The platformer is about controlling an anthropomorphic rooster (Hardboiled Chicken) who’s equipped with a jetpack and many shooty weapons.

Spread across 12 chapters, the goal is to hurtle into levels and blast your way across them in the name of total glory.

There’s a rather tongue-in-cheek tone to all of this, which other daft shooters like this nodded to (see the excellent Broforce as another). All of which gently mocks hypermasculinity and all that jazz.

As Hardboiled Chicken, you get dumped into levels and the ultimate goal is to find, and take out, the corrupt penguin dictator iL Putzki. All of which leads to stuff like this.

Rocketbirds’ aesthetic, and gameplay mechanics, have inspired games such as My Friend Pedro. It’s all good fun you don’t take seriously, making it great for pick-up-and-play kind of antics.

Just don’t expect much depth to the gameplay here, it’s more about the ridiculous humour and daft concept.

You can easily breeze through Rocketbirds blasting everything in sight and clucking in merriment as you do so. But this isn’t to say it’s a poor game, as it was well received back in 2012. We think it’s good fine.

There’s about two hours of gameplay here.

The sequel Rocketbirds 2: Evolution followed in 2016 (but we haven’t played that). All we’ll say is if you’re after a fun little time consumer one afternoon you can’t do wrong with this.

It’s got a great aesthetic, it revels in its ridiculousness, and its fun cinematic scope will leave you happy. That be a good thing, no?