Happy Sheepies

WARNING: You need to butcher your Happy Sheepies to progress in the game. It would be cool if they could live their best happy sheep lives.

Pros:
- Great art and sound.
- Need to vaccinate your lambs.
- Business does feel rewarding to get more revenue per day as your farm grows.

Recommended Changes:
- Capacity purchases should always be available from the market. The game felt unnecessarily challenging and restrictive because I could see that I could afford more capacity but the game wouldn't allow me to buy it until the quest. It would be nice to have the choice of whether or not to invest rather than having to wait for the quest.
- I should be able to name my Happy Sheepies.
- It would be great if the Market could be sorted by Type (e.g. seeds, structures, etc.) rather than just Alphabetical to make finding things easier.

So, I have some concerns. This game is tit for tat a copy of Stacklands. I suspected it when I saw the trailer, but the music, sounds, and graphics are all copies of Stacklands. The only difference here is that instead of cards, it's more graphics and no stacking. The game is okay on its own, but the more I played, the more the constant hand holding and copying got under my skin. I looked at the people who created Stacklands, including the programmers and neither of this wife/husband duo worked on that. If I am wrong, devs please let me know. The game is also super restrictive, you can not do much without a quest, which is annoying. For example, just let me buy another bucket at the start. Please. I do not need to be told exactly what to do to enjoy a game like this, let me explore the mechanics after teaching me the bare bones.

Truly my biggest gripe about this is the devs say on their website that they "are igniting gaming innovation with creativity." In a situation where even the color palate is ripped from another, better game. While I do not want to tell you to just go play Stacklands, I cannot understate how much this game is ripping from it, shamelessly. It is okay to be inspired by another game, but the graphics, sounds, EVERYTHING is copied. If you liked stacklands, I suppose this is another thing for you to play, but I could not get that ick out of my skin to enjoy it.

Dev contacted me on the discord in his public chat saying how hurt he was by my former review, sorry Dev I know you worked hard and it shows, doesn't mean it isn't a work in progress but, Dev knows this he and his team created a “roadmap” that include big improvements for the game for future updates and it’s on his discord. It has potential to be a truly balanced and enjoyable game.

The art is really cute, it’s my favorite part and if you join the Devs discord you can see some of the process of that art. You might be able to make something for the game too if you want, which is really cool and thoughtful of the Devs.

However one of the things we disagreed on is the automation for a game like this where I said “nothing was ever automated” and I 100% the game. You have to manually put items into each step and the finished product goes through 4-5 steps that you have to move the item into each time. I bet you can imagine that it gets super tedious when you have 8 items going through those processes each day along with your side hustle of pastries which has its own multi-step process! I expected that if I got far enough in the game I would only have to put the item in one step manually and once it was done with that step it would automatically move to the next step etc. I standby my former comment as the game did not, in fact, “ever become automated.”

There is also no freedom with the game and you lose a lot of choice, it's a very linear game. So for how short the content of the game could be, the replayability of this game is little to none as it will be the exact same on your next farm.

I left the Devs discord because he sent a message about the review in a public chat in his discord, it’s on his turf so around 100:1 ratio of people who feel the same way that hundreds of people can see and directly message/harass me because my opinion isn’t rainbows and sunshine instead of using the review system (I had comments on) set up on steam where the review and game is. It was a humiliating power move by the Dev. I uninstalled the game and will not return even with future updates. Good job Barker Games you lost a player who was probably just a headache to you.