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Flockers Review
Like far too many games made in the past six or seven years - or since the birth of iOS, which may or may not be a coincidence - Flockers appears to have been created without a specific audience in mind. The work of the staunch British indie unit Team 17 - a.k.a the creators of the ever-reliable Worms series - Flockers isn’t merely misjudged in its tone and / or its execution: it’s just plain misjudged.
It’s also being referred to as some kind of spiritual successor to Lemmings when in reality it’s essentially a down-the-line reskin, starring the sheep you’ve used as weapons in Worms for the best part of two decades. The interface is the same as it has ever been, more or less - which means that it still isn’t an ideal fit for home consoles - but the core gameplay suffers terribly by comparison. Lemmings this is not.
These sheep aren't the grafting workmen that the Lemmings were either: instead of pickaxes and dynamite, these tubby fluffers are working with (among other things) a couple of Tetris blocks and a few bizarre hats that gift them with the ability to jump really far, or (literally) put a cape on and fly towards the sky. You still use explosives to clear blocked pathways and there are teleporters scattered around the place on occasion, but these puzzles are rarely clever. Trial and error is your best friend later on, and the hectic nature of the harder levels (and some of the easier ones, to be frank) is completely at odds with the chilled out vibe that Lemmings has always exuded.
Perfectionists should be a tad wary too. You can complete a level with just one single sheep having survived the trip, although needless to say this isn’t going to net you very many of the three utterly tedious iOS-inspired gold stars. But if you DO go in pursuit of high scores, you’re still at the constant behest of traps and level-specific hazards that try to screw you over completely at random. Consequently it’s very hard to build up the oomph to go back to a level, when you know that your chances of success are based on aspects that are entirely - entirely - out of your control.
The PS4 port isn’t great either. Profoundly irritating sheep noises constantly blare out of the Dualshock, and the only way to disable them is to disable the pad’s speakers in the console’s system settings. You can’t select the tools on your toolbar with the cursor, which it’s hard to ever stop doing; you are forced to scroll along the bar by using the R1 and L1 buttons. This is not an intuitive system, and it’s something that most people will never get their heads around, for the entire duration of the game.
That’s primarily because this is a PC game through to its very core, and and as pleasing as it is to see a game like this launch on home consoles nearly day-and-date with PC, this really is a deeply, deeply scrappy port. What’s perhaps most crippling about the game itself though is that it’s too complicated: needlessly so. From the second it starts, you’re playing levels that feel like they belong in the middle of a game and not at the beginning of one. You aren’t eased into understanding the game’s systems so much as shoved, with the door behind you violently slammed shut.
Videogames like this one are getting very tiresome. Who is it for? It’s goofy and cute and bright and welcoming to younger players, but it’s unapologetically rock hard from the get-go. It’s got that irritating 3 star iOS structure that even your grandmother now understands, but many of the levels are locked until you “perfect” them, which is no mean feat. You’re also almost always asked to do two things at once, and that haphazard brand of frenetic puzzle-solving just never catches fire. This is truly one for the undemanding hardcore only.
5/10
Review By Chet Roivas
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