Sheeple Chase Review

Sheeple Chase is a fun bite-sized racer that’s not baa-shful about its puns.

If you’re looking for a simple, easy quick-pick-up game for your commute, Sheeple Chase can definitely help you hoof it. It’s a bleating fun time that won’t leave you feeling wooly. But if you think these puns are baaaahd, you ain’t heard nothing yet.

Sheeple Chase pits you, the lone sheep on the farm, again the big, bad piggies and other animals in three special bonus races. The timer counts down, and a hand drops you onto the course (the hand is never explained, and seems more than a little weird). Races are very short affairs, often less than 20 seconds (the first race is under seven seconds), and you don’t necessarily have to win. Rather, you just can’t be the last animal to get through the pen gates after they close. You are graded based on your time, from one to three apples, like stars from other titles.

Races feature various obstacles like pond, shrubs, barns, cactii and ramps to take a flying leap over cows. Conversely, there are rainbow colored boosts that will set your sheep on fire (really, you spontaneously combust) to get a good clip going. As you progress, your sheep gains new bonus abilities like running faster to help you beat those pesky pigs.

Sheeple Chase revels in its barnyard setting, with fun, colorful graphics and stompin’ banjo soundtrack. The levels are well-designed, and everything scrolls quickly but not too fast. Controlling Sheeple Chase is equally simple, with either thumb controls to steer left or right, as well as a tilt option which works quite well for some levels, but not so well for others.

Sheeple Chase doesn’t give you a ton of levels to play (24 main races in three cups, plus three bonus races), and there really isn’t much to unlock or achieve here. It does, however, feature an easy-to-use track editor to make, play and share your own tracks. It definitely helps to add some legs to Sheeple Chase, because you’ll likely burn through most of the races in under an hour.

Some of those races, though, are really hair-pullingly frustrating. While you don’t have to come in first every time in order to progress, some of the levels wind so much that unless you memorize the level to a tee, and perform flawlessly, you’ll be stuck repeating the same level over and over. Difficulty spikes are never fun, and it holds true in Sheeple Chase.

And don’t forget those puns from the beginning of the review. Good lord, they’re terrible. From “ewe fancy a swim?” to “don’t feel sheepish when we win!” to “stick to the straight and marrow,” Sheeple Chase overflows with awful punnery. Yes, we all enjoy clever wordplay now and again, but it’s dialed up to such an extreme that the groaning actually begins to hurt.

Sheeple Chase is, in the end, a bite-sized treat of a game. Don’t go in with high expectations, but don’t expect to be disappointed either. When you read “Hope you aren’t afraid to do the quack’step!” don’t say you weren’t warned.

The good

The bad

70 out of 100

David Stone