A Sheep-Sorting Game That’s Undone By Boredom And Frustration
It may seem far-fetched, but Herd Dispatch – the latest puzzler from Afil Games – puts you in the role of a flight controller. Don’t let the cute sheep and farmyards fool you: the sheep are basically aeroplanes, and they’re liable to travel to the wrong airports (barns) if you’re not careful. So, you’re coordinating their flight-routes, making sure they don’t end up at the wrong destination. I’m glad I have cleared that up.
Or, another way of looking at it, is that you’re a shepherd and you’ve been put in charge of some sheep, as is the case for most shepherds. The sheep are subtly different colours, and you have to make sure that a red sheep goes in a red barn, a blue sheep in a blue barn, and so on. But you don’t have a border collie to shout “come by” to, so you have to rely on railroad-like junctions instead. As the sheep trundle down the road, you can tap a button to switch a junction’s orientation, leading it to the correctly coloured barn. When another, differently coloured sheep approaches afterwards, you can switch that junction back.
Muttoning Under My Breath
The sheep emerge onto this maze of paths and junctions every couple of seconds or so. You can’t pause them or slow them down, so you’ve got the game’s main tension: you need to sort them at speed. Each junction has a face-button associated with it, so things become a bit of a dance. You’re pressing X to open a gate for one sheep, while pressing LB to close another one further down the path.
It is all as ‘tap your head, rub your belly’ as it sounds. Sometimes, the problem is that two sheep are on the same path, but with a junction-switch right at the end. So, you have to wait patiently for them both to get there and then switch-track: likely while dealing with some other sheep on the opposite side of the maze. At other times, the problem is of a more frantic nature. You need to quickly identify where a sheep needs to be and tap the buttons accordingly.
See, it’s just like a flight controller sim. Just simpler. And for a little while, I was on board. Herd Dispatch gave me a chance to show off my multi-tasking skills, and the slow, plodding nature of the sheep meant that I could make the odd mistake and still win out in the end. You get given more sheep than you need per level, so you can even lead a red sheep to a yellow-barn, just to see what happens.
But what bothers me is that, for such a simple game, I can’t help feeling that Herd Dispatch gets an awful lot wrong. It shouldn’t feel as irritating as it does: there’s so little room for friction to creep in, but creep in it does.
Pulling The Coloured Wool Over Your Eyes
What grinds my gears most is the colours of the sheep. Heaven knows how colourblind players would approach Herd Dispatch, because I have normal colour vision and I can barely tell the difference between the sheep. A red is extremely similar to a dark pink, and the dark pink is extremely similar to a mid-pink. Two dusky pinks register similarly to me. All of this means that sheep get sent to the wrong barn regularly, and I get the unhappy “baaa!” sound effect more often than I’d like.
It’s so unavoidable. You start with four or five sheep, and they are ALL variations of pink and red. In the later levels, greens and blues turn up. Why not introduce the greens and blues earlier? Why not have black and white sheep, rather than the United Colours of Pinkerton? I’m utterly bemused. It’s lucky that each level has more sheep than I need, because I will make at least one mistake per level. But it doesn’t make me feel particularly rewarded when it happens.
Carrying on the ‘bemused’ theme, the junction-switching is bizarre. You can’t swivel a junction while a sheep is on it, which is absolutely fine with me. It’s sensible that there’s a limit to when you can pivot. But switch a junction moments before this restriction comes into effect, and the sheep will ignore the new junction orientation. Sheep A can be approaching a leftward junction and you switch it to a rightward junction moments before it gets there. But Sheep A STILL heads leftwards anyway. I yank clumps of hair out of my head like I’m sheep-shearing myself.
There are a couple of other, minor issues (speed-up is on the R button, while resetting the level being is on the L button, which is catastrophically similar; the button prompts for each gate can camouflage or hide under the game’s UI). But mostly it’s the major ones that make Herd Dispatch a clumsy, frankly annoying experience. There aren’t many components to Herd Dispatch, but they’re still faulty.
Ewe Could Likely Do Better
Even without these flaws, Herd Dispatch would have been – at best – a distraction. There’s a reasonably hefty 30 levels here, but I could feel the boredom creep in at about level 15. Herd Dispatch struggles to find variety in the sheep-sorting. It adds in more sheep colours and more barns, but nothing else. There are no slow sheep and fast sheep; no junctions that act slightly differently (Thomas the Tank Engine-style roundabouts would have been cool). The extra sheep and barns help to make things more frantic, a little more demanding, but that’s it. There’s no need to change your approach or think differently.
You can see where Afil Games are coming from. They’ve got a surplus of hex-based maps from their path-making puzzle games, and they want more ways of using them. We had a tower defence using these same maps in Dino Hex Trap, and now we’re getting a kind of flight-control sim in the form of Herd Dispatch. But while the tower-defence worked, this one doesn’t. It’s too simple to maintain the attention, too unclear to be anything but bothersome.
I’m kind of intrigued how Afil Games repurpose their hex-based grids next. I’m half expecting an old-school turn-based strategy game with panzer tanks, but the tanks are replaced with axolotls. You heard it here first.
Important Links
Can You Keep Your Sheep On The Right Path In Herd Dispatch? – https://www.thexboxhub.com/can-you-keep-your-sheep-on-the-right-path-in-herd-dispatch/
Buy from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/herd-dispatch-xbox-series/9PPCHNHC0D0N/0010
Buy an Xbox One version – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/herd-dispatch-xbox-one/9P88B86FZRJM/0010
Or a Windows PC version – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/herd-dispatch-windows/9NGVFMRW4G9X/0010
