Flock! Review - Xbox 360

2.5

Gameplay: 2
Graphics: 5
Audio: 3
Multiplayer: 6
Innovation: 5

Introduction

Everyone has particular tastes. To me, Flock! was a particularly cruel form of downloadable masochism.

Gameplay

The basic concept here is that you, as a flying saucer, need to abduct farm animals. You do this by shepherding them through the levels back to the mother ship where they get sucked up and presumably harvested for their flesh. That’s pretty much it. The farm animals include sheep, bulls, chickens and pigs, each of which have slightly different behaviours. You’ll start with sheep, but then have to deal with charging bulls, flying chickens and spherical pigs with a tendency to roll. There are also geysers that shrink the woollen sheep (letting them fit through fences), manure and mud that distract the animals, and a slew of other small variations on gameplay that are gradually introduced.

I found Flock! to be a torturous experience. To shepherd the animals, you have to float behind them and nudge them in the direction you want them to go. If you go too fast and get on top of an animal, they won’t be pushed forward, so then you’ll have to go back and get it, which inevitably means they scurry further away in the wrong direction. There is no precision whatsoever – if you’re trying to get one bull out of a pack to knock over a fence, you’ll have to hope that by pushing the whole crowd one of them will successfully clear the obstacle, and that the rest won't fall off a cliff and die. The animals get stuck in corners, on ledges and in trees. And thanks to the physics system - an odd inclusion - they’ll trip over the gates that you knock over, and get stuck on them too. It is infuriating.

Your performance on every level is graded according to how quickly you collect the minimum number of animals. I suppose this adds the replay factor if the basic gameplay doesn’t drive you insane at the thought of it. I will readily confess to not having completed all the single player levels. I couldn’t. I was honestly cursing at the screen through every painful session. It is just not my game. The stupid animals go every direction but where you want. And then to add a race against the clock too – it just drove me mad.

A quick side note – your ship can quickly accelerate for a short period of time, and will acquire other power ups including a tractor beam. This raises a problem, though. If my ship can pick up fences and strip the leaves off trees with the tractor beam, why can’t it just pick up the animals? At the end of each completed stage, the ship warps back into place on the mother ship. It literally disappears in one place and reappears in another. I mean, okay, it’s a game. But honestly, if my ship can warp through space and uproot huge pine trees, why do I have to push these bloody animals around? I was thinking when playing ...