Barnyard
A Mario Party built for one.
Tags: Barnyard Categories: GBA Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Michael Hanning on Aug 21st, 2006
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Barnyard (title page) | 1 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Action | No | ||
Do you ever find yourself getting tired of Mario Party? Do you find yourself wondering how it would be if Mario Party were portable, tied to a movie about talking cows and didn’t have as many minigames? If you answered yes to all of the above, you’re in luck – Barnyard for the Game Boy Advance fits your anthropomorphized minigame niche perfectly.
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The game starts you as new cow on the movie’s farm. There’s a decent amount of choices in your sprite and coloration, then it drops you in with the cast. Every animal is well-detailed and fluidly animated, the color scheme is bright and well-done, even the music is impressive. Backgrounds are a little mundane in comparison, but load times between screens are negligible making them forgivable. If nothing else Barnyard has raised the bar on what can be done with a kid’s game on the Advance’s hardware. Once yo0u’re settled onto the farm, the focus settles on the minigames and doing favors for other animals.
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The ‘favors’ you run for other animals become slightly routine as they more or less consist of “Go talk to that animal and then come back to me” or the occasional “Gather this many pieces of food and come back to me.” The format is basic but almost infinitely renewable, since every animal needs something different and there are plenty of animals on the farm. There’s a drawback here – the map only points you directly to where you need to go for storyline-based favors and a lot of the animals are hard to tell apart. The timed events are few and far between, so you can probably get around this by running around the farm until you see an animal with a question mark above its head. These favors are also the fastest way to make the game’s currency, Barnyard Bucks. These can be spent to purchase minigames for your basement or food for your cow.
The minigames are a mixed bag. You unlock them as you wander around the farm and can later buy home versions for the barn so you don’t spend as much time walking around. They run a pretty good variety that rely on your timing and coordination and most of them control well. There are a few genuine clunkers in there just in case you were getting your hopes up too high, but by and large the games are enjoyable. The problem is that there aren’t a whole lot of them and once you’ve beaten them replay value is limited. Younger gamers may be more forgiving here than I am, of course, and I’m certain there’s at least one kid whose appetite for whack-a-mole is absolutely insatiable.
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If you do enough favors for the right animals a storyline will eventually begin to form, though it’s handled somewhat ineptly. The best example of this is the game’s most somber moment being broken up by an impromptu dance-off that you can’t turn down. You can ignore the storyline parts to proceed at your own pace, though many of the areas and minigames are only unlockable as you proceed through the game.
For a handheld title, the game takes a unique spin on the extras. Rather than a gallery or a separate menu item you get the entire basement in the barn to yourself. There’s a jukebox for unlocked music, space for the minigames you purchase and a gallery to look through pictures you’ve found. It’s actually an entertaining spin on the idea of extras and genuinely feels like something you’d want to spend time with.
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The lack of multiplayer might put a limit on how long the game holds your attention. All the fun of minigame-centered titles like Mario Party is playing it with friends and removing that possibility loses a lot of its appeal. You could hand over the Gameboy to a friend to see if they beat your high score, but things like the bike race would be more fun to have two players at once.
Barnyard is a surprisingly well-crafted kid-friendly game. There are plenty of minigames, the animals from the movie show up and there’s even a storyline for the ambitious. It’s not a game for the Type A player trying to get to the end but for kids who want a virtual world to have fun in, it’ll be hard to find a better candidate than Barnyard for the Gameboy Advance.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
+ Plenty to do + Visuals and music are superb + Minigames are fun to play and have some good variety |
7.0 |
| What Doesn't | |
|
- Story is awkwardly handled - A better map would have been nice - Incredibly short if you choose to only pursue the story. |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| It looks good, it's fun to play and thee's a lot to do around the farm. Young gamers who enjoyed the movie will find a lot to enjoy here. | |
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Tags: Barnyard
Posted by Michael Hanning on Aug 21st, 2006 and is filed under GBA Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
