Mini-review: Bouncing Sheep

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You've got to give the developers some credit here for an accurate title. Dropping sheep onto trampolines and other bouncy obstacles. In fact, the game title almost reviews itself! The gameplay itself is part strategy, part random, and all freemium. 

Briefly, then, here's the pitch, from the Store description:

The battle has just begun. The peaceful life of sheep have been disturbed by noisy birds. Hit and return noisy birds to their home. Drop the sheep and let it bounce! Join the sheep on a battle through dozens levels with colorful noisy birds, suns and clouds.

• Easy to learn, but hard to master gameplay and absolutely fun 
• Cool graphics makes this game very addictive to play
• Dozens of amazing levels 
• Power ups to help with those challenging levels
• Social, share your highest score to your friends

Here's an illustrated walk-through and mini-review. Though Bouncing Sheep is free to download, so you can also just grab it yourself here and have a play, of course!

Screenshot, Bouncing Sheep

You'll get the idea immediately - you drop sheep from a giant crane (which you can position by touch, then tap to drop), aiming to bounce them, bagatelle-style, off clouds, bouncy suns and, ultimately, trampolines, all in order to try and make contact (or, usually, double-contact) with the targets.

Screenshot, Bouncing Sheep

Three different graphical environments are presented. Although coded using the Unity graphics engine, most of the power is kept for the physics - don't expect 3D rendered, rotating hills!

Screenshot, Bouncing Sheep

A couple of dozen levels across each environment should be enough to get you going, plus the developer seems active, so expect some more level packs in due course. And yes, there's the traditional 'Angry Birds'-style star system per level....

Screenshot, Bouncing Sheep

OK, so the game in action and with sheep bouncing away - up to three at a time. Most things need two or three bounces in order to fly away or disappear, so there's quite a bit of action involved. One huge oddity is that a target score is given, but there's nowhere on screen to tell you how many point you have so far!

Screenshot, Bouncing Sheep

There are elements of strategy in knowing roughly where to drop each sheep to achieve each target (e.g. here, 5 yellow birds), but there are also big random elements as each sheep bounces around. The mix of luck and skill is about right, overall.

Screenshot, Bouncing Sheep

As you'll have gathered from the top-left freemium indicators in the game, failing a level loses you a life and you buy more lives with diamonds....

Screenshot, Bouncing Sheep

... while diamonds cost real life money with in-app purchases. The maximum here is £9 - 270 diamonds should net you just over 100 extra lives, so won't last forever, but probably happily for the rest of your enjoyment of the game. It would have been nice to have seen this maximum price option unlock 'infinite' lives, in the same was as another in-app-purchase (for 79p in the UK) also removes in inter-level adverts.

 

Speaking of which....

Screenshot, Bouncing Sheep

This advert is actually seen side-on in the game, since you're playing in landscape, which doesn't make much sense - there's room for a fix here, I think!

Overall, a decent arcade game - whether it has real longevity for you will depend on how hooked you get with the fluffy heroes....

Source / Credit: Windows Phone Store