Flockers Early Access Preview

The simplest way to describe Flockers, as it heads into Steam Early Access for PC today, is as a mash-up of the classic Lemmings gameplay with a Tim Burton-esque art style and the wicked sense of humour so readily apparent in Team17’s perennial Worms series.

Is it unfair to lean so heavily on such comparisons? Maybe, and Team17 have been avoiding the Lemmings name, calling it an A to B puzzler instead, but the similarities and inspirations are quite clear to see.

The level starts with a flock of sheep spawning in sequence from an odd steam-punk device, and marching ever-forwards until they hit an obstacle and double back on themselves. They’re not particularly smart, and it’s up to you to direct them through the level, lending them power ups, or creating barricades and fluffy staircases.

Helping your sheep get around are a fairly restrained selection of powers and abilities for you to lend them. Aside from being able to set your sheep into particular formations to allow others to climb over or block progress, you can give your sheep the ability to leap further as a Jumper, fly up walls as a Super Sheep, or explode to blow up certain objects.

Depending on the level, you’ll either have and pick up these abilities in abundance, and you can easily apply them en masse thankfully, or you’ll have just one or two of each, and will need to be particularly careful how you use them.

They will need a lot of shepherding, as they find themselves in a gnarled up environment that is hell-bent on killing as many of them as possible. Gigantic axes, huge spikes and whirring circular saws come in all sorts of places, just waiting to be triggered and cut a bloody swathe through your flock.

Compared with the innocently unaware bleating that the sheep make when alive, each death is met with a particularly icky wet splat and quite distressingly plaintive final cries, as blood covers the scenery. What makes it worse that it’s so very often your fault that all of this has happened, usually through a lapse in attentiveness as you try to solve the puzzles.

It’s worst when a long string of sheep fall or leap to their deaths, but it’s not much solace that it’s often near impossible to successfully take all of your sheep from the entrance to the exit of a level, thanks to the particularly devilish level design. A single sheep reaching the exit is enough for success, but the final rankings then fall into the familiar three star system, that seemingly every puzzle game features these days, as well as a single golden sheep tucked away in a difficult to reach place on each map.

Your task is made all the harder as you progress, with split spawn points that drag your attention from one side of the map to the other, triggers which set off events out of view, gravity reversing doodads and plenty more besides. On several occasions I found myself having to retry several times just to get to the end, or simply unable to figure out what I had to do to “succeed”.

The Early Access release at this point contains 25 levels, with the first 20 in the factory setting and the last few in a new outdoors area, but this will naturally expand over time with more settings yet to be revealed. The level creating efforts won’t simply be restricted to Team17’s output either, as the level editor has been made public and the game will tie in to the Steam Workshop to share content among the community.

Getting past the similarities to the past is a simple step, when it’s a genre that hasn’t really been serviced in the last few years. There’s a joy to revisiting that idea, but what Team17 have brought to the table is the particularly dark and twisted universe and setting that is more than able to elicit laughter from me; usually because I didn’t look before I let my sheep leap to their demise.