Parents' Guide to Rocket Buddy

While being unoriginal isn't good, and having a lot of ads can be annoying, being unoriginal, ad-heavy, and so easy that it lacks any challenge is three bad steps too many. A rather blatant rip-off of Angry Birds, the physics-based arcade game Rocket Buddy has you shooting your titular pal out of a cannon at a target, and maybe some diamonds as well. To do this, you simply point where you want the cannon to shoot your buddy and let 'er rip, hopefully right into the target you're trying to hit.

But while the levels get increasingly intricate, with new levels and anti-grav streams and so on, the game is undermined by numerous annoying and easily avoided issues. For starters, this is a really blatant rip-off of Angry Birds, but doesn't have that game's cleverness, challenge, or weird sense of humor. More importantly, it's super easy, even in the later levels. Most levels take only a moment to figure out, so there's nothing to task your brain or your love of trial & error. The game's also lousy with ads. They run randomly between rounds, they come up if you want to spin the prize wheel, and there's even one that often appears whenever you start playing. Even worse, that latter ad is for the premium version of the game...which is ad-free. All of which makes Rocket Buddy a terrible friend.