Cows stampede. That's right, their special ability is that they run away. Quickly.
Flock! has a very basic premise: each stage is timed and requires you to herd a certain number of farm animals into the Motherflocker ship for abduction by scaring them with your tractor beam. Earning better times on each stage awards you gold, silver or bronze medals, while getting every animal aboard the ship nets you a star. There is really no penalty for taking too long on a given stage, nor is there particular incentive to work towards increasing your overall score, as all you’ll get are leaderboard bragging rights.
There are light puzzle elements in a certain sense of the word, as each of the four herdable creatures have their own unique properties and ways of interacting with the world -- for example, sheep shrink when you get them wet, allowing them to pass underneath fences, and chickens fly off cliffs, allowing them to cross large gaps. But you won’t exactly have to scratch your head to figure out when each of these abilities are necessary to get the animals safely to their new home.
The chupacabra is real!?!? Run for your lives!!!!
Although Flock! is listed under the puzzle genre, regardless of what animal you are currently dealing with, it’s not too complicated when every challenge you face has one of two solutions. Fence blocking the way? A confusing corn field? A bottomless pit? An intimidating scarecrow? A pile of icky poo or sticky mud? Go around. For any obstacle that cannot be circumvented, the alternative solution comes courtesy of The Princess Bride: “Hit it with the rock!” Thrown boulders stun scarecrows, flatten fields, demolish fences and even activate the occasional cattlepult, all of which will help you navigate sheep, cows, pigs and chickens across any of the stages..
Because the previous two solutions work for nearly every problem, the unique properties of each animal feel much more like gimmicks than tools in your arsenal. At no point is this more obvious than when dealing with the round little pigs, who bounce off pinball posts when pushed quickly enough. This never serves any function other than to limit how quickly you can move your pig balls through certain areas. Consequently, the only accomplishment you come away with is having moved X number of units from point A to point B -- assembly line work at its dullest.
Why then is it punishing to move beasties around the map when that is the entire foundation of the game? All too often critters get caught in corners where your tractor beam is too far above or below the animals to make them move until you are directly overhead, at which point it’s really anyone’s guess what direction they’ll choose to flee in. Here you’ll feel more like you are playing Lemmings, watching your furry friends abandon all sense of self preservation and head straight for the nearest stairway to heaven.
I can't stand the way she leads those rams around by their rocky mountain oysters! Ewe minx!
When not being disappointed with the single player offering, you can choose to be disappointed alongside your friend. The option of giving each player control over a specific beam -- tractor to lift, depression to flatten -- works on paper, but whoever controls the depression beam won’t have much to do. This then causes depression in the player and becomes a vicious, bitter cycle that can only be solved through psychotherapy, or the counting of sheep. The problems with “split beams” can also be solved by using the “twin beams” option, which allows both players to participate in corralling varmints together. In this case there really is nothing like the deep relationship forged by two friends tending livestock together atop a broken ridged mountain. (No, that isn’t Capcom’s Academy Award you’re smelling.)
There is a rather robust level editor, where progression through the campaign levels eventually unlocks all the creatures, items and landscapes available throughout the rest of the game. You can then use these unlockables to design and populate your own maps, uploading your creations and downloading/rating others’. Although this is a great idea, in order for user-generated content to succeed there needs to be a dedicated fan base, which so far just doesn’t exist for this title. There are a few user maps that stand out (such as “This is Spartaaa,” where you chase one lone sheep into a large pit), but beyond that there aren’t many more examples of innovation you would otherwise expect to find.
Signs, signs, everywhere is signs...
There are a few other extras thrown in to beef up your UFO, such as eventually earning the ability to boost and move quickly about the map, but there is as much significance to digitally creating crop circles as there is to getting a board and some rope and walking around in a field all night long. Unless of course you believe Mel Gibson is a true prophet, in which case you’ll probably really, really like this real-life-alien-abduction simulator. For everyone else, there’s the excellent alternative of not buying this title.
While Capcom definitely deserves credit for creating a game that allows you to move and shoot your tractor beam at the same time, the feature here isn’t enough to push this game beyond mediocrity. Only hardcore fans of stockyard bondage games will derive any sort of pleasure from this game, but maybe even those people had best steer clear, as I think that sort of fun is illegal in every state except Texas anyway.
Final Score: D+
It isn’t every day that a game comes along and boldly dares you to chase farm animals in circles until they get scooped up by a giant spaceship. That deprivation is a good thing, as is the fact that what these abducted animals are used for is never fully explained: are we feeding a hungry chupacabran army, or are we a PETA ship whisking the enslaved livestock of the world off to a fence free Utopia? Choose your own adventure.
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