Barry the Bunny is a cutesy 2D platformer where you play as Barry, the bunny. Barry likes carrots and building bridges. However, the Overalls Gang is in the business of destroying things, specifically, the bridges that all of the little bunnies need to get back home. So Barry must go from level to level, collecting wood and rebuilding the bridges he comes across.
That’s the premise of Barry the Bunny. It’s a pretty straightforward platformer in which each level has hammers, carrots, and three pieces of wood scattered around it that you can collect. You can throw the hammers to either defeat enemies or blow up the explosives that are scattered throughout the levels. The carrots are just a point system that don’t really do much, and the logs are needed to rebuild the bridge that each level has.
The controls are simple: you jump, walk around, climb up ladders, throw hammers, and pick up power potions that let Barry take more hits. Each potion you pick up gives him a new piece of apparel, like his hard hat or cool sunglasses. These potions carry over from one level to the next so if you’re good enough you won’t even need to pick up more as the game goes on. However, take one hit without any protection and it’s back to the beginning of the level.
Barry the Bunny is pretty generous with saves though. Any logs you pick up before dying on a level stay in your inventory, so as long as you grab each one once, you’re able to rebuild the bridge towards the end of the level and move on. The difficulty does slowly increase as you play more, with new enemies and traps appearing, but there isn’t much of a puzzle-solving aspect to the game. There are some levels where the platforms you need to jump on to get to a log will fall away or blow up, and when that happens you need to restart the level to get the log. But that’s about it.
The interesting thing is, you don’t need to actually rebuild the bridges to progress to the next level. So if you decide Barry has more pressing matters to attend to, like collecting carrots, then you can leave the poor bunnies stranded. When you revisit the world map the level will flash yellow to show that the bunny never made its way home, but that’s the only pressure you have, to return and actually do your job as the one Bunny contractor that’s present in the game.
Technically there are achievements that will incentivize you to collect those three pieces of wood and actually help them out. But all of the achievements in Barry the Bunny can be completed within the first 26 levels of the game. In fact, Barry the Bunny is an easy 1000 gamerscore and you’ll be grabbing the lot during your lunch break.
I’d say Barry the Bunny is a good game for a younger audience. The art style is cutesy and the difficulty, while it does increase, stays very manageable. Especially when you take into account that once a log is picked up you don’t need to collect it again. For me though – and I’m guessing others – this will mean the game becomes fairly redundant, pretty quickly.
There are four different areas to play through and at the end of each is a chase level where one of the members of the Overalls Gang will chase you as you run away from them. I actually liked these levels the most because they are much more skill based and quicker paced. They are still fairly easy to complete, but they add some much needed variety to the game. I only wish there were more than four of them.
It doesn’t help that the music stays pretty much the same for the entirety of Barry the Bunny. The boss levels do get a bit more exciting but again, there aren’t a lot of them to actually play through so they don’t really break it up. The last achievement to unlock is called “A lot of Levels” and I’d say that’s a pretty accurate statement. But quantity isn’t always a good thing. I’m just glad that they give you the full 1000 Gamerscore early on.
Overall, Barry the Bunny can be completed in under two hours, especially if you are rushing through things. If you’re an achievement hunter then it does give you a quick 1000 Gamerscore, but I don’t think you’ll get much more joy out of it then that. There’s nothing wrong with the game per se, it’s just easy and a bit redundant after a while. But if you have a kid or much younger sibling that needs a game that isn’t too hard, then Barry the Bunny is worth checking out.
Join Barry the Bunny over at the Xbox Store
