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My goodness, Chillingo’s latest puzzler is adorable. You play as a crafty cute black fox that gets the idea to attach a propeller from a plane crash to himself to aid him in grabbing hens. I told you it’s damn (I mean darn) cute!

Besides being one of the cutest premises in recent years, the game itself is clearly inspired from saturday morning cartoons. During your flights you’ll be chucking bowling balls, using dynamite, and of course swooping down to capture all the hens. After all scooping up the hens is what Sly Fox is all about.

In order to scoop up the hens you’ll need to control your black fox using one of two control methods: tilt controls or virtual controls. If you choose the virtual controls you will be deleting Sly Fox in a mere second. In other words it’s awful and borders on the worst virtual controls that I’ve gotten my hands on. The tilt controls on the other hand are fantastic.  With the tilt controls I was able to master the control of flight within the first stage and after awhile I was able to learn to swiftly move the fox with ease in order to complete the much more challenging stages that’ll appear later on.

Scooping up the hens becomes much more complex in later stages and you’ll have to using your cunning fox wits to think about how to approach each level. This can be seen early on as picking up a rock and figuring out what ice blocks to destroy first. You see if you destroy the ice that’s blocking you from the hens in the wrong order you’ll loose your rock and not be able to finish the level! However perk up your fox ears and think about it…and soon all the hens will be yours.

With most games the gameplay stays the same but ramps up the difficulty or something of that nature to keep it fresh. Sly Fox on the other hands goes to the extreme where the difficulty of the puzzles themselves keeps them fresh and introduces new level mechanics that continue the evolve from stage to stage. One such example is the inclusion of stealth missions that makes sure you take the hens as quietly as possible. The trick here is that you’ll need to figure out not only how to destroy the obstacles but also the order to pick up the hens. Now if you pick up a hen on the early side, this might cause a chain reaction such as a platform tower collapsing from an uneven weight balance. So in short, Sly Fox is not only one of the cutest games out there, it’s one of the craftiest iOS game that we’ve seen this year.

The Bottom Line: 9/10 (Super!)

Don’t let Sly Fox’s cuteness fool you, this is one challenging puzzle-platformer.