Preview: Flockers

Team17, the developer behind the Worms franchise, has branched out with a new puzzle title called Flockers.

The developer describes the game as a “twisted blend of Lemmings‘ inspired gameplay and Tim Burton style macabre, all topped off with a dose of that classic Worms humor,” and to a point, they’re not wrong.

It’s Lemmings. It’s very Lemmings. The only way this game could be more like Lemmings was if you didn’t try to herd sheep and instead guided lemmings from the start of a level to its end.

I just want to say this one more time: it’s Lemmings.

As for the rest of the description, I think Team17 might be exaggerating a tad. Burton-style macabre, to the developer, means dark colours and some buzzsaws. As far as Worms-style humour… well, okay. I guess. I never really found Worms to be that funny, and I find Flockers to be around that same level.

I mean, this is a game that’s making a play on the word “Fuckers”, is it not? That’s just comedy gold.

In Flockers, you guide a bunch of sheep to a goal. To do so, you acquire crates of power-ups to help you along with your quest. Some crates let sheep become climbing blocks, stairs, or barriers. Some let sheep jump wide gaps, or fly Superman-style up the sides of walls. The best power-up is just like it is in Lemmings: to blow a sheep up.

Oh, in an ultra over-the-top mess of blood. I guess that’s Burton-style macabre, right?

Flockers isn’t bad, but it’s not great either, based on what I played during my preview. It’s a one-trick pony that kind of wears thin only after a couple levels. In the media preview, I went from 2500th position on the first level leaderboard to 230th by the sixth level. It wasn’t because I was getting any better at the game; merely, people just hadn’t been bothered to play that far into the preview build. That’s never a good sign.

With a short period of time before release, I’ve already flagged some things I hope will be tweaked before the game comes out. If you want to pause the game, you sure can… but you can’t use that time to strategise and assign power-ups. Neither can you select multiple sheep at one time; if you want to make 30 sheep fly, or jump, or whatever, you’re going to have to click every single one individually. My wrist says no thank you.

The one thing I always enjoyed about Lemmings was that levels seemed open-ended; of course, you had a goal and a couple ways to get to the end of a level, but you also had space to dick around just to see what kind of mess you could create. While Flockers has been billed as a puzzle game, the fifteen or so levels I played were very linear. You couldn’t do much apart from what you were supposed to. I’m hoping that’s corrected in later levels.

If you enjoy Team17’s work, Flockers might be more up your alley. Same thing if you’re a die-hard Lemmings fan looking for a current-gen fix. Otherwise, you might want to hold off and check what our review has to say about the upcoming title.