Space Cows

Genre: 2-Stick Shooter

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: Included in Flame Keeper + Space Cows bundle, along with Flame Keeper.)

Space Cows is a 2-Stick Shooter released in 2019 on PC and Nintendo Switch. In this game, players take the role of Best Regards, an oddly-named farmer with an even more odd fixation on everything to do with cows, particularly his own cow, which is abducted by a mysterious man, prompting Best to follow them, finding himself on a space station where he must save cows and battle mutant creatures using his deadly plunger.

At this point, it’s probably clear that Space Cows isn’t a game that takes itself very seriously (the title Space Cows probably should have given that away), and it is indeed full of silliness, though I personally didn’t find it to be very funny. Yes, humor is subjective, and some people will appreciate this game’s juvenile fart jokes and cow puns more than others, but I can only hear the game’s protagonist say “Milk it! Milk it gooood!” so many times before it becomes tiresome.

The cheesy voice acting (sometimes literally) suits the style of humor the game is going for, but I just did not feel like any of these jokes landed, apart from occasional 2D art in the mini-games that’s gross and bordering on grotesque, which is… well, it’s certainly interesting. Apart from this, the presentation uses 3D visuals from a side-scrolling view that look nice but are somewhat repetitive, backed by a forgettable soundtrack.

To its credit, Space Cows does attempt something a bit different with its 2-Stick Shooter gameplay. Unfortunately though, it doesn’t really work. The main gimmick here is that players can only let loose one shot at a time, and are helpless until that shot either hits an enemy or collides with a wall. This added challenge is offset by a brief slow-motion ability to better dodge around enemies or take them out with precision attacks, but even with this ability, Space Cows seems to be a game that isn’t hard so much as it heavily penalizes mistakes, which can make for difficulty spikes when you find yourself in a particularly nasty room full of enemies and need to take them out quickly before they swarm you, but missing just one shot will surely lead to you taking a hit.

I don’t think Space Cows is an outright bad game, but neither do I think it’s especially good. The single shot mechanic could have had potential in a game that made better use of it, but here it just seems like a frustrating limitation to artificially inflate the game’s otherwise relatively low difficulty. You have an absolute wealth of alternatives on Nintendo Switch when it comes to 2-Stick Shooters, so unless you’re just absolutely delighted by the hilarity of farts and dairy-centric dad jokes, I suggest you skip this one.

tl;dr – Space Cows is a 2-Stick Shooter about a farmer propelling himself around a space station with farts so he can rescue cows from mutant creatures. As silly as that may sound, the game’s humor gets old quickly, and what you’re left with is a 2-Stick Shooter with a central mechanic that you can only fire one shot at a time, which seems like a way for the game to artificially inflate the challenge, but not the fun. This isn’t a terrible game, but you have countless better options on Nintendo Switch.

Grade: C

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