Home Sheep Home: Farmageddon Party Edition

Genre: Puzzle-Platformer / Platformer / Party Game

Players: 1-3 Co-Op (Local), 2-4 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

Home Sheep Home is a series of family-friendly Puzzle-Platformers based on the Shaun the Sheep stop-motion animated series from Aardman Animation. The first game was released on mobile devices in 2011, with the second game coming to mobile devices and PC later that same year. From what I can tell, it looks like the content of these games was paired with a new Party Game mode inspired by the then-upcoming Netflix-published Shaun the Sheep movie, Farmageddon, and republished as Home Sheep Home: Farmageddon Party Edition, released on the PC and Nintendo Switch in 2019.

Fans of the Aardman studio’s works may be disappointed to hear that Home Sheep Home drops the stop-motion animated look of the series and films, but if you are among that number, you needn’t be too alarmed – despite being re-imagined as hand-sketched 2D drawings, Home Sheep Home still retains much of the charm of the franchise it’s based on, keeping the personalities of its characters, the same sort of sense of humor, and the same lovable silliness that makes this franchise so special.

This is in part thanks to the sound, which keeps all the voiced “baa”s from the show, as well as the simple acoustic guitar theme. If you’re still not sure about this game because it doesn’t look quite like the Shaun the Sheep you know, I can at the very least say that it still sounds like the Shaun the Sheep you know.

I’m a bit disappointed that the focus of this game is narrowed to only three characters from the show – Shaun, Shirley (the big sheep), and Timmy (the little sheep), with Lu-La the alien from the Farmageddon movie putting in an appearance in menu screens. Other prominent characters like The Farmer and Bitzer the Dog are apparently MIA. Still, the characters that do show up here are very recognizable and act appropriately.

The gameplay in the main campaign is a Puzzle-Platformer with a very simple premise that builds on that premise beautifully. Players can swap between each of the three sheep (or get one or two friends to control the others). Shaun jumps highest, Shirley weighs the most and is better at pushing objects, and Timmy can fit in spaces the others can’t. Simply by moving the three around, players must solve puzzles and ensure that all three sheep get to each stage’s exit.

Despite that simple premise (the sheep don’t have an inventory, and don’t do anything other than jump), this game manages to find a surprising variety of ways to challenge the player, largely by using physics-based puzzles. There are definitely a few times where players will be challenged to figure out where and in what order to move each of the sheep based on how their movements affect the level, and the inclusion of co-op here feels like a natural extension of the game that requires coordination and teamwork. And there are numerous puzzles here that are fiendishly clever without being overly difficult.

With this being the case, one might wonder what the Party Game content brings to this game, and the answer is that this content is surprisingly fun and distinctly different from the Puzzle-Platformer stuff while still clearly being built using the same engine. Each of the 8 different minigames included here offers players a different kind of Platforming-based challenge. In some cases they’ll be playing a side-view volleyball or soccer game, and in some they’ll try to be the last one standing on a platform being assaulted by some manner of hazard, but most of them are uniquely fun, and all of them at their core use the same basic platforming gameplay.

The success of both the main Puzzle-Platformer campaign mode and Party Game multiplayer mode are in spite of the game’s biggest issue – the core platforming here isn’t very good. Hit detection for where the edges of characters and objects are can be a little nebulous, and the physics of how objects interact sometimes doesn’t seem quite right. There will be times in the main campaign when you’ll have to restart a mission due to the game’s wonky physics, and in the Party Game mode you’ll have a few matches that are won or lost due to some eccentricity of said physics. Also I wish that both of the game modes here had more content, though with a $10 price tag, it’s hard to complain too much.

In the end, despite the issues with the core gameplay behind Home Sheep Home, this still manages to be one heck of a co-op Puzzle-Platformer and a solid Party Game to boot. It’s a great use of the franchise, ties together two different kinds of gameplay that are each wonderful fun to play, and I suspect that whichever of these elements attracted you to this game, you’ll likely walk away from it satisfied.

tl;dr – Home Sheep Home is a family-friendly co-op Puzzle-Platformer and Party Game based on the Shaun the Sheep animated series and films. This game manages to do a great job with all of its disparate elements – the license is scaled-down somewhat, but what’s here does justice to the franchise. The Puzzle-Platformer content is smartly well-crafted, and the Party Game content is fun and varied enough to keep players entertained for a good while. I have some issues with the core Platformer mechanics here, but overall this is an excellent package that does its best to please everyone, and largely succeeds.

Grade: B+

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