Sheep

I bring you .. Sheep, the first game (that I can think of, anyway) which is centered around herding dumb woolly animals. But this is certainly no "One Man And His Dog" sim - it's a puzzle game with a hint of Douglas Adams and a twist of Lemming. We got our hands on some beta code to find out more about what could be one of the year's .. strangest games.

Close Encounters

Sheep, it seems, are not as stupid as we think they are. In fact they are an advanced race of interstellar travellers, who visited the Earth long ago and left behind a small colony to study humans.

Unfortunately, since then the sheep have forgotten why they are here, lulled into a blissful existence of chewing grass and running around in sun-soaked meadows. But now the extraterrestrial sheep are back to rescue their lost colony, and to help them they have recruited four shepherds. Which is where you come in.

There's Bo Peep, a rock singer described as "Bjork crossed with Courtney Love" - a worrying thought indeed. Adam Half Pint is a private eye who now believes in a vast conspiracy involving sheep. Motley is an energetic pet who dreams of becoming a sheepdog. And finally there is Shep, an aging all-action sheepdog with an attitude to match.

Cue thirty levels of sheep-herding mayhem as you take on the role of one of the four abducted shepherds as they try to round up as many of the lost flock as they can.

Insert Obligatory Welsh Joke Here

Being dumb, cowardly animals, the Earth-bound sheep will always run away from you when you get too close to them, making herding easy to get to grips with. And thanks to the game's excellent "artificial stupidity", they will flock and move around more or less as you would expect.

To help you learn the ropes, the game includes a series of training missions, with pigs on hand to give you advice as you chase the sheep around the level. These introduce you to some of the game's many obstacles and hazards, which vary from straightforward walls, fences and hedges to diabolical mechanisms which exist simply to reduce your flock to fluffy gibs.

During the game you will encounter sheep dips (which leave your flock covered in brightly coloured paint, but otherwise unharmed), flamethrowers, sheering machines, combine harvesters (which thresh your sheep up into a little bale of hay), and a whole range of trampolines, catapults and bounce pads that can hurl you and your wool coated friends across the map.

The sheer range of ways in which your sheep can be annihilated is impressive, varying from the frustrating to the hilarious. Each level brings something new to the mix, whether it's hazards, scenery, power-ups or ways of scoring bonus points. There's something strangely amusing about watching your sheep get flattened by boulders, hurled across rivers by a catapult, lanced by robotic knights, or knocked flying by moshing punks...

Conclusion

Sheep is a charming little game which brings back fond memories of the early Lemmings games, with the same mixture of simple basic gameplay and hordes of cute but stupid animals being mindlessly slaughtered.

From what we've seen so far it's certainly looking very promising. The idea is stupid but strangely compelling, the graphics are colourful and brimming with character, the levels fiendishly imaginative, the gameplay addictive, the humour is mostly spot on, and the ovine disco scene inspired by "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind" just has to be seen to be believed...