Funky Farm 2 Review

It’s not every day you come across a farming game that lets you turn your animals into steaks and chops. If that’s not amusing enough, it’s also not every day that you find a game that includes cows wearing stilettos, chickens wearing pearls, and maybe a sheep or two sporting a mullet. That’s just touching on a couple of features you’ll find in Funky Farm 2, a time management farming game that’s definitely original.

The story is pretty loose and open-ended. You’re in charge of a small farm, who’s only inhabitants include a jazz loving cat named Piper, and a couple of sheep. Your job is to make the farm funky by turning a profit, earning upgrades, adding more animals, and buying an assortment of colorful accessories for the animals to wear.

The actual gameplay is very simple, but offers lots of room to form your own strategies. You have a cash goal to meet at each level, which allows you to advance. Icons scroll by on the bottom of the screen, each representing a task you can do on your farm. You start off managing sheep, which are pretty easy to raise – they wander around the farm and eat grass. You can select the shear icon to gather their wool, which earns you easy cash.

As you proceed, you earn access to more animals. Chickens lay eggs, and can also be sold for meat. Pigs eat a lot, but their meat is valuable. You have to feed them slop by clicking the slop bucket icon. To cull them, click the cleaver, and they’ll be replaced by a lovely pile of pork chops. You can also turn your lambs into lamb chops, and your cows into steaks with the same cleaver tool.

Bigger animals, and especially pigs, unfortunately make a lot of mess. You can’t place an animal over a sloppy mud spot. Once you’ve earned the grass seed upgrade, you can clean up the mess by planting grass over these spots. Often, you get to choose which animals you like to have on the farm.

Wolves steal animals from the farm, but clicking on the wolf repellent spray keeps wolves away for 20 seconds. Building fences also helps protect your animals, but only for a little while.

An icon must be available for you at the bottom of the screen in order to complete an interaction. Some icons can be used repeatedly, without picking them up again. These include lassos, and grass seed. Others are only good for one use, like the sheers or hatchets. Once you’ve unlocked the tool shed, you can store one action icon for later. Once you’ve unlocked the tractor, you can pause, advance, or rewind the conveyor when the appropriate icon comes up, which is very helpful.

Your animals have names, which you can see when you hover over them. At the end of each level, you are asked to round up all of the animals before it gets dark. This earns you extra cash. You do this by grabbing the lasso icon, looking at the name listed in the pen, and clicking on the correct animal and dragging it to the pen. This is very challenging, since if you have more than a dozen identical sheep, it’s not very easy to find the one named "Brenda."

You also earn cash, which can be used to buy funny decorative accessories for the animals, like a top hat, pearls, or sunglasses. This is where the “funky” part comes into play. There are 17 accessories in total, which makes for a very amusing farm. The accessories are assigned at random to different animals. This doesn’t really affect gameplay, but it’s a cute diversion nonetheless. One thing to note – the chickens look much better with Afros than the sheep (who’s Afros seem to grow out of their backs).

Once you’ve played a few levels in the main game, you can unlock untimed mode. This is basically endless game play, using the animals and features you’ve already unlocked in the main game play mode.

If you own the first Funky Farm, there aren’t too many drastic changes. You get several new pets, but these basically act like any other animal on your farm. You can even shear the llama for a nice extra profit. There are many more animals than the first (which was mostly just pigs and sheep).

There’s lots of silly humor, like a chicken named "nugget" and a sheep named "mutton." There are also tons of opportunities to develop a strategy. For the best success, you need to balance your animal selection just right, and know when to send your sheep to the slaughter (literally).

On the whole the levels are all very much the same. In that sense, it can get very repetitive. However, the rules are simple, and it’s enjoyable to play, so the repetition doesn’t pose a huge problem. The length is about standard, though replay value is questionable. The music is fairly old school, but suitable.

Moving animals around poses a bit of a problem. You can move your dog around by moving his bone. Otherwise, you need to use a lasso to get your animals where you want them. It would have been cool to have more control over the farm inhabitants. It can be tough to select the right animal when they stand close to each other. You can’t click directly on them, and must actually move your mouse to the side of an animal to get it.

A few little things aside, Funky Farm 2 is a fun diversion, offering something different. If you’re a member of PETA, you might not like the idea of eating the animals, but as far as being quirky goes, the game is very funny. The pacing is good, and the rules are simple, making it an enjoyable and accessible game to play.

If you liked this game, try Farm Frenzy, Youda Farmer, and Dairy Dash.