It’s a nice idea but unpleasant to do for any length of time. For right-handed people like me, this results in an awkward control method where I’m constantly changing grip. You can also use the tablet screen to move your controlling cursor hand, though you still need to use the right trigger to pick objects up. It’s a good solution, even though it adds an extra step to frequent, repetitive tasks like replenishing the food supply. If you select a spot with multiple objects, a radial menu will appear to let you refine your choice. Creatures and objects you can use are highlighted on a minimalist, contrasting background.

Developers Tantalus have provided a workaround for this in its normal mode the tablet displays a cut-down version of the main farm view. Perhaps when I spend more time with the Wii U gamepad it will feel more natural, but I found it very fiddly trying to pick up eggs or lay down fences, thanks to the number of objects on the screen. As you can imagine, the farm starts to get pretty crowded, pretty quickly. Foxes will try to carry off your chickens, so get some guard dogs to keep them at bay. You’ll have to hire some planes to patrol the skies and scare them off. Do the same for wool and milk and you’d be sorted, if not for the aliens.Īs we all know, a cow’s natural enemy is the UFO. What you’re supposed to do is save up for an egg collector to hoover up all your eggs and carry them to the collection point. You could build three pens fairly quickly and spend all your time frantically clicking on things to harvest, sell, fill, tickle and so on. The entire game is about the slow, inexorable shift to automated farming. They’ll simply grab a helium balloon and float away, never to be seen again. You first have to irrigate the fields with a water tower, fence off a pen for each animal type, build a barn for them to sleep in, buy a food trough, buy a water trough and pay to keep both troughs filled. Of course, it’s not just a matter of plonking your animals down in a nice grassy field and hoping for the best. It takes time though, so you’re better off building nice spacious pens and decorating them with trees, wagon wheels and other farming tat. If one of your sheep isn’t producing enough wool, you can select it and zoom in to manually fill its happiness meter by stroking your animal on the touchscreen.

Eventually you’ll be able to buy sheep, cows and other farmyard animals. Keep your hens happy and they’ll produce more eggs. Starting out with just a few hens, it’s your job to level up the farm by selling eggs. You run a farm on a randomly-generated map. A version came out on 3DS earlier this year and the Wii U looks much the same. It’s a cutesy resource management game, accessible for kids but with enough depth to keep adults busy as well. Funky Barn is one of the launch window titles for the Wii U and I checked it out last week.

Funky barn wiiu