Animals are great, aren't they? Well, okay... some animals are great. I once got chased by a mildly furious badger and spiders aren't too hot, but when it comes to roly poly farm animals it's all good. Roly poly farm animals getting herded into UFO's by a smaller UFO is surely the recipe for all sorts of gaming fun, yes?

Actually, er, not so much. See, the idea of Flock is that you have to herd animals around self-contained levels, at the end of which is a huge UFO which sucks them up with its traction beam. In between are all sorts of natural hazards that have to be avoided and tricky conundrums that require various animals' different abilities. It does sound fun, granted, but in practice it soon becomes a little tired.

Perhaps the biggest reason for this is that the game starts at a treacly slow pace and never really recovers momentum. Although you are offered sheep, cows, pigs and chickens to muck around with throughout the game, Flock takes until about fifteen levels into proceedings to offer you anything other than the woolly baa-baas and hence you quickly tire of flying your little micro UFO around behind herds of the stupid things trying to funnel them around the natural environment and into your mother ship.

To give things their dues, once you do have other animals at your disposal then you do start enjoying things a little more. Whilst chasing sheep around with your UFO's beam is all well and good, you will also find that the things can shrink in water and hence fit through narrow gaps such as fences. Cows later prove to be lumbering oafs who are useful if you need to bash down some sort of obstacle (usually to release other animals), pigs roll around and get disconcertingly attracted to piles of poo and chickens can hover for a little while after running off the edge of a cliff or drop. The general gist with each, though, is that they are all incredibly stupid and need chasing around.

As you can imagine, this leads to all sorts of puzzling as you are presented with a series of increasingly elaborate levels to guide your animals around. Initially most levels are fun and can be completed within a couple of well-thought minutes if you have enough skill, but the further you plunge in the more time they end up absorbing, and this is not necessarily a good thing.

The main reason for this is that the herd you control is often teeth-gnashingly wanton when it comes to directional sense, meaning that you can quite easily spend five or so minutes carefully cultivating a group and guiding it around hedges, through gates and whatever, only for them to go slightly mad and tumble off a cliff edge into the sea. The two main reasons this tends to occur are firstly that the control over your UFO is somewhat fiddly and imprecise even if you are using the cursor keys rather than the mouse (trust me, you really have to), whilst the other problem is that your herding traction beam can never be switched off, hence if you do accidentally lead animals slightly too far in one direction you end up having to loop around them whilst giving them enough space not to be scared off the other way, which requires a pretty wide berth. It feels pretty clumsy at times.

Likewise, as you progress through Flock you are given a series of upgrades to your ship such as the ability to boost along at greater speed for a while or an upgrade to your beam so you can shuffle scattered piles of junk away from your flock's intended path, but you never really feel as if they're anything other than a slightly different and slightly throwaway attempt to refresh the game as it plods along toward its conclusion.

All of the above is a great shame, as other things such as the wonderful cartoon-like patchwork quilt scenery and comical animals are wonderful to look at, whilst the music is pretty catchy too. There's an enjoyable enough co-op option offered where you and a chum can try to join forces to collect the various animals up, and there's also a pretty comprehensive level design mode for which you gain various assets as you complete bits of the main game. It's certainly not a terrible game by a long chalk.

That being said, it's not as good as anyone who would have looked at the screenshots and read a little about the premise would have hoped, either. Having gone into it expecting to have my pants charmed off by the whole thing, I instead found myself getting rather bored disconcertingly quickly and struggling to ever really get back into things once more options and tactical considerations were offered. Perhaps having to run away from a raging badger was more fun than I initially considered it to have been, then.