Herding Dog Review

By Nate Lakritz
10 years Ago

Herding Dog is a port of a mobile game called Join the Pack, and both are developed by Xixgames, a one man studio&period; Although their relationship is never explicitly stated by the creator, they are obviously the same game&period; Herding Dog puts you in control of a farm dog, whose job it is to herd animals to certain target locations&period; While moving the various animals, items must be collected as a secondary objective to complete each level&period; Occasionally, levels have a predator who tries to kill the animals you are working with, and you’ll have to scare away the enemy by barking&period; Sadly, the basic pitch of the game is all that it has to offer&period; However, I will go as in-depth as possible with Herding Dog in order to fully convey my strange experience&period;&NewLine;<figure id="attachment&lowbar;106363" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-106363" style="width&colon; 1280px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img class="wp-image-106363 size-full" src="https&colon;//cdn&period;bagogames&period;com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/03173111/ss&lowbar;22f590b4d5206d98630af789d9bf6c4dc0711676&period;1920x1080&period;jpg" alt="Herding Dog 1" width="1280" height="720" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-106363" class="wp-caption-text">(Herding Dog, XixGames)</figcaption></figure>&NewLine;Herding Dog plays out on a low-poly art style, and offers 21 levels&period; The first nine levels have certain themes, while the rest are randomly generated and repetitive&period; As harsh as it may sound, I believe Herding Dog is a game for little kids&period; And by little, we’re talking 4 or 5 year-olds&period; Let me explain why I’ve come to this conclusion&colon; First off, Herding Dog is extremely easy and if there’s such a thing as too forgiving, it’s being defined here&period; You practically can’t lose a level unless you try&period; Technically, if all the animals you’re supposed to herd get killed by enemies, you’ll fail the level and will have to restart&period; However, it’s ridiculously easy to hone in on one target and lead them to the objective location&period; As long as you can stay relatively near the sheep, pig, or cow&semi; the enemy will leave you alone&period; &NewLine;The only reason why you would be motivated to do well on a stage by rescuing all the animals is because you’re provided with a letter grade at the end of each phase&period; Perfectionists and players looking for a personal challenge might want to reach an A grade, but there’s not even an achievement or in-game leaderboard for incentive&period; You can’t even check your previous scores, for crying out loud&excl;&NewLine;The soundtrack in Herding Dog is decent, but only contains nine tracks&period; Also, each melody is only around a minute long and has a looping effect&period; This can really drive you insane after a while, and the game is mind-numbing enough to amplify this effect&period; Apparently, Herding Dog originally launched with only two songs&excl; I feel sorry for whoever bought the game near it’s release and had to go through that torture&period;&NewLine;<figure id="attachment&lowbar;106364" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-106364" style="width&colon; 1920px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img class="wp-image-106364 size-full" src="https&colon;//cdn&period;bagogames&period;com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/03173053/ss&lowbar;27d2fe516f35498ec182a82159931d0309f02096&period;jpg" alt="Herding Dog 2" width="1920" height="1080" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-106364" class="wp-caption-text">(Herding Dog, XixGames)</figcaption></figure>&NewLine;Alright, now let’s talk glitches&period; The game is filled with some major bugs from start to finish&period; The objective marker that tells you where the target animals are often breaks and ends up pointing you to nothing&period; Whenever this happened, I had to scour the entire map for a single chicken, so a level that should have taken about thirty seconds ended up taking ten minutes&period; Also, animals sometimes walk through fences, boulders, and other objects placed in the environment&period; This bug doesn’t really break the game, but creates a general lack of polish&period; &NewLine;Now, here’s a huge glitch that really shouldn’t happen&colon; If you exit to the main menu after completing a mission instead of moving on to the next one, the game completely bugs out&period; The &OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;stage completed” screen pops up and blocks you from clicking anything, forcing you to restart the entire game&period; Once restarted, Herding Dog loops on the level that you most recently completed and will not let you move on until you beat it&period; Glitches like this can ruin a game, and unfortunately Herding Dog contains a pretty obvious one&period; If you work around the problem by quitting the game only in the middle of a level instead of after finishing one, you should be fine&period; However, a serious issue like this shouldn’t even exist in the first place&period;&NewLine;<figure id="attachment&lowbar;106365" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-106365" style="width&colon; 1366px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img class="wp-image-106365 size-full" src="https&colon;//cdn&period;bagogames&period;com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/03173034/Screenshot-296&period;png" alt="Herding Dog 3" width="1366" height="768" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-106365" class="wp-caption-text">Cows stuck in a fence are a common sight&period; (Herding Dog, XixGames)</figcaption></figure>&NewLine;Hopefully, now you can see why I believe Herding Dog is mainly for kids, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing&period; A five year-old can easily figure out the game, and won’t be bothered by the glitches&period; They might actually enjoy the goofy, looping soundtrack and have fun playing around as a dog&period; It will entertain them for hours on end, and contains little violence&period; I think Herding Dog shouldn’t be marketed to adults and ought to stay on mobile devices&period; It simply can’t perform well on the big screen, and doesn’t provide enough content for even a casual gamer&period; Buy it for your kids, don’t buy it for yourself&period;&NewLine;<hr />&NewLine;A review code for Herding Dog was provided by XixGames for the purpose of this review&NewLine;

Categories: Game Reviews, PC Reviews
Tags: Arcade PC Top Stories

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