


It's your farm - and it's like no farm you've seen before!
FUNKY BARN WIIU FULL
Slap on your straw hat and grubbiest coveralls and take hold of your Wii U GamePad - it's time to get your hands dirty! Devote yourself to your own slice of lush countryside and take up the challenge of creating a beautiful farmland full of animals, crops, trees and more… then develop it into the craziest, most offbeat farm imaginable, overflowing with the whackiest contraptions and goofiest gizmos you and your animals have ever seen! This is not your ordinary farm… The Wii U GamePad makes it easy to place objects around the place and can also be used to pet your animals – a feature that has little in-game impact (it makes the animals temporarily happier), but is adorable.Condition: Very good throughout and fully tested. So, once the farm is ticking along nicely by itself for the most part the only thing left to do is landscape it and enjoy the pretty cartoon vibe.

Occasionally you’ll be set with a ‘mission’ to produce a certain quantity of a certain good within a time limit, but these are completely optional and don’t result in enough rewards to really bother with them. For obvious reasons, then, this game is pitched at the young and young-at-heart. Nothing deep or insightful, just clean fun. Because the game presents this feature, usually so irritating in games, with a healthy sense of humour and charm, it pulls it off as frivolous and irrelevant fun. The arcade-style babying of the animals is essentially the point of Funky Barn. And then, just like an earthquake in a Sim City game, a storm can hit the farm causing a lot of very expensive damage and a good half hour of panicked repair work.

The animals are genuinely stupid and vulnerable, and so it’s important to keep a close eye on everything that’s going on around you. Or that would be the case if the chickens were not susceptible to fox attacks, if cows were not in danger of alien abduction and your other pets were not in danger of drowning themselves in the nearby lake. With a bit of skill it’s possible to get the farm to the point where everything is running on automation – and then it’s time to sit back and simply enjoy the animals running around and generally being cute. Animals produce goods at such a rapid clip that it would be impossible to keep up if it was not for the ability to also build machines that automate the process of collecting the produce and selling it on your behalf. It soon grows into a chicken, lays down some eggs, and once you start selling those, you’re off and away.Ī couple of hours later and you’re managing sheep, cows, geese, pigs and alpacas (not nearly enough alpacas in games), as well as a handful of plant crops. With that money you’ll build shelters, food and water troughs and do some landscaping to make the chick happy. The idea is unsurprisingly to build up a farm, starting out with just the one chick and a couple of dollars in cash. It’s essentially a very light-hearted simulation game, with a dash of humour and a touch of arcade-style pacing. Funky Barn is one such game, and boy am I glad I picked it up on impulse. One of the things I love most about a new console is playing games that I would not normally touch.īecause I want to play games on the console, but because there are not all that many games available on it, I find my eye being caught by games I would simply bypass with the other consoles.
