John Bedford (Modojo): Assuming this isn't your first tower-building game, you'll already be very familiar with the core gameplay of Happy Squirrels. First you choose to construct a floor, then you choose the building type, and then you wait for your workers to complete it. You can use a potion currency to complete the work instantly, but you only have a handful of these of course, with more available in exchange for your cash.
Pocket Gamer: Calling Happy Squirrels a tower-builder is only slightly inaccurate. While much of the gameplay in Happy Squirrels involves the same sort of gameplay that you'd find in a tower -builder like Pocket Minions, it's actually all about building a tree.
Happy Squirrels is not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, but you'll be disappointed if you're expecting any innovation beyond the superficial novelty of its arboreal subject matter.
148apps: You don't have to be nuts for squirrels to enjoy this adorable tower-building game from Chillingo, but it might help.
Happy Squirrels – NOT SO HAPPY
Major bugs by careless developers make this game unfishable and yet it won’t stop them from sending you many push notifications begging you to spend $99.99usd for in game currency (nuts and potions)… maybe they need the extra money for fixing their game.
Bug list so far:
• If you exit the game while it is in the “Main Menu” be careful because as soon as you reach the next calendar day, you will be trapped on this screen upon re-launching the app. This is because the brilliant developers at Ipanema Games decided that at every night at midnight they would add an automatic trigger that launches a “wheel of Fortune” bonus game that disables all other button from the game until the bonus game is played, so if the “Main Menu” is opened, you cannot see the “wheel of Fortune” and your game gets stuck… Solution: reinstall, but seriously, why bother?
•Upgrading the Aquarium to 5 stars does not trigger the completion of objective: “Life Aquatic” thus the corresponding accessory (a costume for your avatar) does not get awarded and the achievement “Max Upgrade – Aquarium” does not get awarded either.
•Upgrading the Hospital to 5 stars does not trigger the completion of objective: “I’m all right” thus the corresponding accessory (a costume for your avatar) does not get awarded and the achievement “Max Upgrade – Hospital” does not get awarded either.
•The achievement: “Five Stars Times Ten” never gets triggered despite myself having 26 rooms with 5 stars upgrades.
•The achievement: “Spin the wheel 30 times” requires you to open the game every day for 30 days in a row and spin the “wheel of fortune” for a daily bonus in the form of in game currency, sounds simple right? Not really and here’s why: if those consecutive days are not in the same month, the counter resets, thus you must start playing on the 1st of any month in order to make sure that 30 days later you are still in the same month, otherwise start again. This is just plain stupid!
Well, what do you expect from a company that doesn’t even run their own website instead redirecting to a Facebook page where, of course, they do not post legitimate contact information pertaining to a business address and/or phone number where refund demands could be sent. Thankfully I did not spend one penny on this and I never will buy anything from them until they have a legitimate website. Fixable bugs, I understand (in all fairness, every software has them), but giving my hard earned cash to a faceless and stateless entity…no way José!