It’s best to underline it right at the start. Team 17’s latest game, their first original title in a good long time, bares a massive similarity to classic save-em-up puzzler Lemmings. Some might see that as a bad thing, that Team 17 are ripping the idea off, but I see the situation the same reason I back many Kickstarter games – there’s nothing else like it in the modern gaming landscape. Team 17 made the last one and that was eight years ago, so with Sony unwilling to return to the franchise or to put it on systems where it might actually work, like PC, they’re the perfect developer to revisit that classic gameplay and put their own spin on it. And spin they most definitely do.
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| What could possibly go wrong? |
I’ve only played a short three-stage demo but I’m happy to tell you about the horrors I encountered (in a fun way). The setup and gameplay is, as mentioned, familiar. A flock of cute sheep enter a stage through a pipe one at a time and walk forward continuously, oblivious as to whether they’re heading towards safety or certain doom. By assigning various abilities to sheep, usually with an inordinate amount of timing and planning, your job is to get as many of the flock through the exit portal as possible by helping them avoid all the various traps and pitfalls in their way. Which is easier said than done of course, and therein lies the fun.
There may be more or different ones in the final release, but the demo I played had eight abilities. Let me give a quick list, albeit without the proper names since I stupidly forgot to write them down. Ability 1 simply resets a sheep to its normal habits. Ability 2 makes the sheep jump a decent distance, and wear a woolly hat. Ability 3 is ‘Super Sheep’, a popular cameo from Worms, and this permanently allows the sheep (unless you reset it with the first ability) to fly up and over walls when it meets them. Ability 4 is 'Exploder' and works the same as the Lemmings classic re: blow up a guy along with an obstacle, although here it only works on specific breakable objects and you don't just blow up one sheep, you'll kill any around that one too. Ability 5 makes a sheep stop and allow the rest of the flock to climb on them to reach new areas. Ability 6 puts two sheep together to form a wall, much like the invaluable Lemmings ability 'Blocker'. Abilities 7-8 extend Ability 5 by turning two or three sheep into steps for the others, with RMB used to change its direction.
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| Get away from that wheel you stupid sheep! |
Unlike Lemmings these needed to be picked up in little item boxes around the stage like the weapon drops in Worms. As my sheep made my way around each stage I noticed other differences. There was a lot of emphasis on pressing buttons to activate machinery and let your sheep move on, and often they would activate deadly traps too. In Lemmings the time was mostly against you with maybe a couple of traps and a perilous fall, but here the entire stage seems designed as a factory for killing sheep. Anti-gravity devices were a particularly cool non-lethal addition that flipped the flock so they walked on the ceiling, although I've got a feeling these were in Lemmings Revolution but I'll let Team 17 off since they're pretty damn cool (and the upside-down axes requiring perfect timing were nice too).
Most notable was the physics engine in play. Team 17 have made some very devious traps to catch you off guard, and the worst were entirely down to the momentum of the sheep. At one point for example my Super Sheep gently nudged a giant wheel after pressing a button that lowered my other sheep to another part of the stage. The wheel slowly started moving, gained momentum, sped up, and after following its path to my horror I realised it was heading Mouse Trap-like to massacre my flock in a few seconds time. I got most of them out of there into a teleporter but still lost a dozen, but I was amused to note that my Super Sheep was actually riding the wheel right until the end and its grisly demise.
I do have to underline how grisly those demises are. Giant meat cleavers quickly thrust downwards, giant mincing machines appear out of nowhere, lasers blast lambs to smithereens, explosions spread carnage, blood flies everywhere, pieces of sheep rain over the stage, but it's nothing compared to watching one of your cute flock get impaled on a spike and having that dead body hang there for the rest of the stage. Even just falling too far earns a splat and a messy red patch. Lemmings was well known for its amusing level of violence but I feel Flockers goes above and beyond it in this category!
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| AAAAAARGGGHHH |
The graphics style is a lovely cartoony steampunk world, and the sheep are particularly delightful - which makes it all the more distressing when they get squished by a giant metal mallet, but that's all part of the fun. The audio is good too, with a whole bunch of cool sounds coming at you from every angle, not to mention the playful and happy bleating of the sheep - doubly distressing when they're pulverized by a swinging spiky flail then. Flockers will easily appeal to everyone just by looks and atmosphere alone, which is a trait it shares with both Lemmings and Worms. Controls were simple too, all done with the mouse with LMB selecting and RMB either changing direction (for the 'steps' abilities) or expanding the cursor so you can assign abilities to multiple sheep at once.
While obviously owing a massive debt to Lemmings, Flockers already looks like an amazingly fun game in its own right - not to mention of course that the Sony-owned franchise seem unwilling to come to mouse-driven platforms or make a new game in the series, so I'm very happy for Team 17 to create a 2014 homage with their own unique slant on the concept. Plus the idea of using sheep seems so perfect I'm amazed it hasn't been done before. Flockers will be released on Steam Early Access in the next couple of months with about 20 stages to start, before going final when Team 17 is ready. It'll even have Steam Workshop support so hopefully there'll be new levels popping up regularly. I'm personally excited, but then I was always a sucker for Lemmings. Hopefully Flockers will be better than Humans at any rate...
Most Anticipated Feature/Element: What devious physics-based traps Team 17 can come up with to murder those poor little lambs.
