Sheepherds Review (PC): Throw Your Friends a Bone

Party games and cozy games should go together like peanut butter and jelly, but they’re often much closer to water and oil. Party games are a fun time, but their inherently competitive nature doesn’t exactly help everyone keep a cool head. Doubly so when the difference between winning and losing is often a literal roll of the dice. Sheepherds seeks to combine these deceptively incompatible genres, and it happens to succeed with flying colors.

Sheepherds doesn’t fit into the mold you might expect from party games. There are no boards, no prompt-based improv comedy, and nary a competitive metric in sight. All Sheepherds asks you to do is to be a dog and to herd sheep into a barn to collect their wool.

Bark, Don’t Bite

The mechanics of Sheepherds are equal parts intuitive and satisfying. The player’s tools are as simple as walk, run, and bark. Each dog has a small radius that will steer the sheep in the opposite direction, so you should be careful not to be too pushy with the sheep. Although the herd might wander off without your guidance, you can rely on each sheep to follow the one in front of it. Barking is a good way to quickly redirect the herd, but players can get by just fine without it.

This all comes together to create a very smooth experience, especially for couch co-op. Online play is available, though not something I spent time on while playing. Sheepherds does give you the option to play by yourself, and while doing so is plenty enjoyable in its own right, leading the herd alongside your friends adds an extra dose of depth to multiplayer.

Sheepherds rarely introduces new obstacles, and never rushes players with a timer, but that simplicity doesn’t stop it from being rich in content. There’s a surprisingly large number of levels to unlock, and each of them iterates on core mechanics in ways that help the game to never feel worn out. Each level also comes packed with optional challenges that offer some extra depth, and even give the game some extra replayability.

Sheepherd’s cozy elements are just as fleshed out, with breezy progression and cutesy customization. You can unlock and switch between dog breeds, fur color, and a ton of outfits. Even the lobby area has a good deal of care put into it, with a few vistas that serve as an impromptu photo mode, and even a little stadium to kick a ball around. In my personal favorite tidbit, the stadium is filled to the brim with sheep that cheer any time one of the “teams” scores.

As fun as Sheepherds is, I find it hard to imagine it filling more than a couple of hours. I suppose that only makes it more suitable for whipping out once a month at game night, but it does suggest that the game could’ve traded in its progression system and simply allowed players to have more dog breeds and outfits available from the jump.

The Verdict

Sheepherds feels most clearly directed towards families, but certainly not exclusively so. Between the cooperative nature of the game and its general lack of artificial urgency, I personally found Sheepherds perfect for playing with my significant other. I see no reason why a full group of friends couldn’t have a good time too, whether gathered around a couch or online. If you think that party games feel too active, and cozy games feel too passive, then Sheepherds will feel just right.

Sheepherds was reviewed on PC with a code provided by Ultimo Disco.

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