The blocks and spheres in Gerbil Physics contain little cartoon gerbils that react depending on the situation. I really don’t know what the obsession with gerbils is, and I kind of wish they picked a different rodent. It’s not easy for me to keep telling my friends about this game about gerbils, but that’s probably more of a personal problem.

They are cute, at least, and it’s funny to watch them cringe when you place a bomb next to them. The backgrounds are quite varied, with everything from beaches to teacups to watermelons and penguins. There’s no real reason for all this random cartoon wackiness, but exploding penguins and watermelons are just something that you can accept after a while. The art quality is good, even though it makes no sense.

The sound consists of a lot of explosions, pops, and falling block sounds, and of course, lots of screaming and cheering cartoon gerbils. It’s pretty cute, and the rapid popping noises that accompany a big combo can be pretty satisfying. There’s not much to it, but it works.

Gerbil Physics has one thing going for it: a name that makes people do a double take. Ok, at least it makes me and my brother with a similar juvenile sense of humor laugh. After the giggling and the funny looks subside, I can agree that the title is at least accurate and descriptive. You’ll be placing bombs, using disintegrating guns, and using the lay of the land to move blocks full of little gerbils down to the lower half of the screen. Your goal is to get them under a yellow line.

Ok, the good thing that this game actually has going for it is that it's fun. It's just fun to blow up the little blocks of gerbils and watch them fly across the screen while they scream "Weeee!" It's the way these physics games are usually satisfying. You nudge a giant tower of blocks and then watch everything come down in a satisfying way.

The puzzles in this game are, of course, set up in a way that makes that goal of getting all the gerbils under that yellow line a challenge. It is a pretty well designed game in this respect. You’re required to think pretty hard on some levels, and you’re given limited resources. Some levels even have groups of red gerbil blocks that are forbidden to touch. So you can’t go wild and blow everything up; you have to think around this problem.

You’re given a variety of tools such as mini explosions, bombs, and disintegrating ray guns. The environments themselves are often the tools you need as well. There are environmental aspects of the puzzle like steel plates you can tip over to turn the level in your favor, for example. There are also swinging hammers, exploding skulls, watermelons and penguins. Of course, there are exploding penguins, as well.

Gerbil Physics starts you out pretty easy, then the difficulty ramps way up at around level 20. There are levels that require you to just place bombs to move the blocks. That’s easy enough to understand. But then you’ll run into levels that require combinations of bombs and other items in an exact sequence in order to clear the level. Some even call for some fancy timing, and in fact, doing things quicker will net you a bigger bonus for your score.

The game does provide hints as to what you need to do in the harder levels. When you get to those levels that look completely impossible, you can remember a solution in previous levels and attempt to extrapolate from that. Or you can simply blast away and keep trying to get those gerbils to go where you want them to go. This is, honestly, where the game gets a little frustrating. Because it’s a physics-based game, sometimes it’s hard to do something precisely the same way twice. It might look like you’re placing a bomb in the same place, only to discover things explode in a completely different way the second time.

Gerbil Physics plays fine on my Android Galaxy S II. Placing bombs never feels difficult, and you never get that fat finger feeling. Actually, there are a few levels where you might have some trouble because you want to use an item right by the item select menu.

I did have a few freezing issues with Gerbil Physics, but for the most part, the game is stable and runs fine. The basics are there for a game that normally runs on mobile devices. You can pause any time, and your progress is saved automatically. If it will not be saved, you’ll get a warning.

I think I’ve hit an all time record for the amount of times I’ll type the word "gerbil" in a review. Hopefully. Gerbil Physics is a cute little alternative for those of us that for some reason or another want to do without Angry Birds, or have had their fill of it.