Your finger becomes a sheep dog in Herd, Herd, Herd! on iOS

In 2K Play's latest mobile offering, all manner of barnyard animals have escaped their pens, and it's up to you to help poor Farmer Jed wrangle them back into the barnyard before they escape for good. In Herd, Herd, Herd!, players are presented with 70 levels of varying complexity, with the goal being to tap and hold on the screen to "guide" animals into stars and eventually into their pens.

As with so many other level-based mobile games, each level in Herd, Herd, Herd! come with three stars that can be collected, with stars being required in bulk to unlock new level sets. Levels start simply, asking players to simply guide a single chicken into their pen, but they quickly become more complex and difficult via obstacles on the ground and the addition of more animals on the screen at once.

By tapping and holding a finger in the "air" behind the animal, players can guide the animal in a direction of their choice, but this "backwards" setup takes some getting used to at first. That is, to make an animal move to the bottom of the screen, you'd tap at the top. Animals aren't following your finger, they're running from it. Once you add in obstacles like color-coded animals that need to be placed in matching pens, rotating bridges, and bottomless pits (as examples), things can get pretty hectic.

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Unfortunately, the game is really particular about where you place your finger in relation to the animals on the screen, so it can be easy to inadvertently send an animal into an obstacle or off of a cliff when you didn't really mean to. Furthermore, animals tend to get stuck just outside their pen doors, with invisible walls that stop them from moving until you force the animal(s) to back up and try the entry again. If levels weren't timed, this issue could be overlooked, but after you've spent so much time collecting stars, there's likely very little time left on the clock to herd the level's remaining animals, so these sorts of "invisible wall" issues stand out even more.

Throughout it all, Herd, Herd, Herd! has a lot of personality, with clever level transitions that see animals stampeding into a cloud of dust or cows getting abducted by UFOs, along with cute level graphics and skewed models for each animal. Still, the game gets challenging really quickly, and when that challenge meets technical issues, the game might try your patience more than it does entertain. While the full game of Herd, Herd, Herd! costs $0.99 in the store, you can also download a free version on iPhone or iPad to see if the game's right for you.

Click here to download Herd, Herd, Herd! Free on iTunes >

Have you tried Herd, Herd, Herd! on iOS? What do you think of this challenging barnyard game? Let us know in the comments!