Eets: Chowdown steps away from its PC indie roots and makes its big debut on the Xbox Live Arcade. It’s a mad world and words like Prankster Whale and Radioactive Ginseng won’t make sense until you step into the persona of Eets: Chowdown!.

Eets: Chowdown! instantly will remind you of the classic platform puzzler, Lemmings. Eets: Chowdown is basically a re-telling of that DMA Design's classic game, updated and twisted around with their own original concept. Eets: Chowdown! isn’t a clear clone, Klei Entertainment has enough original material to make Eets stand out on its own, but if you’ve played Lemmings, you'll will see the similarities right of the bat.

The name Eets comes from the name of the lead character, an Eet. The Eet a small creature that loves to chomp down on everything. The Eet actually reminds me off the “Isz” character from the comic 'The Maxx'. Maxx fans will get what I’m talking about, cute, but silently deadly. What an Eet is irrelevant and who knows if the developer even knows. All you need to know is this guy loves to eat and hates getting shot in the face by Ginseng, oh yea, and he loves marshmallows. That's good enough for me.

The objective in Eets: Chowdown is to safely guide your Eet across a level avoid pitfalls and other obstacles. This is done by pre-placing items around a level and then activating them at the proper time. Each level dictates a certain amount of items with various actions that you need to figure out to safely journey across the levels. This is the puzzle aspect of Eets: Chowdown and Eets can be deceptive in difficulty. Eets is fairly challenging which hunkered down half way through the game. This goes to the theory, just because its cute and cartoonish doesn't mean its easy. Although, randomly tough, Eets doesn’t penalize you for restarting levels, so don’t be ashamed if you have to try your luck a few times until you get it right.

Supporting 1080i HD resolution Eets: Chowdown visually stands out as one of the clearest looking games for the Xbox Live Arcade. This is also helped by its cartoon inspired graphics that have a unique visual flare of all their own. Compared to the Xbox Live games, Eets can easily be compared to the visual style of Alien Hominid. As you can probably guess Eets is highly creative which helps differentiate itself from similar games and its inspired roots, Lemmings. The audio on the other hand is un-memorable and defiantly not as creative as the subject matter. Audio doesn't play a large role in Eets and if they had to swing one way, I'm glad the creative juices where poured into the graphical side.

Playing through the whole adventure mode of Eets will take a few hours which mostly likely won’t be spent continuously. I found I got burnt out fairly quick when playing Eets; it could be because I’m not a huge puzzle game junkie, or it could be that Eets only has six themed levels over 120+ levels. This really isn’t enough to keep it interesting in one sitting. Don’t get me wrong, Eets is addictive and very interesting with its zany puzzles and interesting lead character that is always ready to chomp down, but it seems like a game that can be replayed for a few moments in between other games.

Also included in Eets for the XLA is the Marsho Madness mode which never appeared in the PC version of Eets. Marsho Madness is a basic, button blaster where you have to enter correct joystick button codes in order to attack enemies. Your character is stationary and like asteroids you have to defend yourself from overwhelming odds of strange creatures. Marsho Madness is multiplayer supported (1-4 players) and surprisingly fun, even with its simple concept.

Eets: Chowdown is a solid platform puzzle game in the vein of Lemmings. Ported from a successful PC run it’s easy to see why Microsoft approved an Xbox Live version. Eets: Chowdown is easy to get into and loveable. The game can get repetitive and a little stale, but in short dosages it works. It’s safe to say if you have enjoyed any of the versions of Lemmings over the years you’ll be into Eets: Chowdown. For the price of 800MS points, Eets is worth the investment. As always with live games, check out the demo and see if you chomp down on Eets: Chowdown.