Jam City

2/5 stars

Here we go, another rushed mobile game based on a done-to-death franchise. Does anyone watch Family Guy anymore? Does anyone really care about its inanity or its hackneyed, excessively long jokes? Who is this game aimed at?

This is the fourth Family Guy game from developer Jam City, and easily the worst, a puzzler that has nothing behind it but its characters.

It starts off with a series of little stories – Meg has to get made up because she’s so ugly, Peter has to sell beers around town, Quagmire has to pick out condoms – all the clichés that rush to mind when you think of the show, but with no sense of originality or thought put into them. It’s lazy and boring, a series of tawdry, tired cut scenes leading to gameplay that has nothing to do with the world of Family Guy.

Like most other games in the mobile stores, it’s about matching three things – types of beer, condoms, or three types of make-up. Match, match, match, with nothing but cheap graphics and reused shots from episodes to keep you going.

Much of the game (for Android and iOS devices) works decently, but there’s an overall sense of shoddiness that indicates it was almost certainly rushed out. And then there are the boss fights, in which players repeatedly fight the show’s huge chicken. It worked once in the show, a funny riff on

They Live and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but then they ended up milking it whenever ideas ran out – and that’s what happens here as well.

It’s almost as if Jam City knew what had they had on their hands when they titled this Another Freakin’ Mobile Game. It’s indicative of what’s wrong with the mobile gaming world: laziness, a lack of originality and a reliance on recognisable names.