Happy Squirrels: Build a giant treehouse for free on iOS

While the rate of tower-building games (like Tiny Tower) being released on iOS has decreased in recent months, that doesn't mean they're entirely dead. In comes Chillingo with its own take on the tower-building genre, a free-to-play treehouse building game called Happy Squirrels.

Happy Squirrels focuses more on the actual growth of the tree than what goes on within it, and is a less complex experience because of it. You won't have to worry about hiring staff for each kind of floor, which also eliminates the need for "apartments" within the tree. Likewise, each individual floor, whether it be of the food-production, service, community or fun variety, will automatically produce profits (in the form of nuts) over time, without you being required to set production into motion.

Rooms can be upgraded to increase their productivity, and you can complete a series of light quests if you wish to earn large amounts of nuts in bulk. As you might expect, each additional floor added to the tree is more expensive than the last, making upgrades to floors more important than simple quantity. The tree itself will grow a few nuts every few minutes, along with potions, the game's premium currency, which can also be purchased with real money.

Outside of this focus on treehouse building, you'll also be able to play simple mini-games like a game that has you tilting your device to catch fruit that falls from the top of the screen. As you make progress in Happy Squirrels, you'll also eventually be given the ability to interact with your treehouse's squirrels, changing their appearances and dressing them up in fun clothing options. Both this and the mini-game feature give you something to do while waiting for all of your current upgrades or building projects to complete, which is sometimes a long process given that you'll only have a limited number of squirrel construction workers available at any one time.

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All told, Happy Squirrels is a more basic tower-builder that throws in some cute mini-games and animal customization gameplay to keep things feeling fresh. You're given plenty of nuts and potions at the start of the game to make some real progress, and so long as you come back to the game once or twice per day, your treehouse will continue to grow at a fairly steady pace. It would have been nice to see more individual rooms available to build in each category, but hopefully, Happy Squirrels will become popular enough with mobile gamers to warrant additional rooms being added over time. If you'd like to try Happy Squirrels for yourself, you can now download the game for free on both iPhone and iPad for free.

Click here to download Happy Squirrels on iTunes ---->

Have you tried Happy Squirrels on your iOS device? Do you still like games in the tower-building genre, or are these types of games "old news?" Sound off in the comments!