Welp, Crashbots won’t work for me, so I guess I’m skipping that one.

• Divide by Sheep
  

  11 hours playtime

  19 of 19 achievements

This is a puzzle game. Each level consists of multiple islands and groups of animals, and you can throw a group of animals to a different island by clicking the island they’re on, dragging towards another island in-range, then letting go of the mouse button. Islands are made up of units that determine how many animals they can hold at once, and animals react differently to each other when thrown onto the same island (example: wolves eat other animals, at which point they can’t be thrown anymore). The goal is to get the exact designated amount of the right type of animals to the raft in the upper-left corner; do this for all three rafts in a row and you beat the level.

There are five worlds, each with 30 levels (the menu represents them as dots, so at first you think there’ll be a sixth world but it’s just a splash screen asking you to rate the app). While that is quite a bit of content, many of those levels are pretty bland and easy. In the first two worlds (60 levels), I counted maybe four genuinely challenging levels. Even in the later worlds, where the puzzles get more consistently tricky, it isn’t uncommon for you to encounter five or so levels in a row that you solve in less than a minute (two tops).

Plus, each world introduces at least two new gimmicks, so of course the game has to have another five levels that regress the difficulty so you can get used to them. Each time a new gimmick is introduced, the game shows you a comic that illustrates how the gimmick is supposed to work, but this doesn’t always make everything clear. For example, the comic for the fire tiles shows the fire activating after an animal is thrown on the switch, but in reality, pushing a switch turns off the flame, and you have to evacuate the switch island to turn the flames back on.

However, the worst is when the game introduces pigs. All the comic illustrates is that pigs target other animals (normally, animals target empty spaces before jumping on other animals). Thing is, this is the first time two different types of throwable animals can occupy the same island, so you have to go through some trial and error to figure out which animal others will target if thrown on an island that’s full but has multiple kinds of animals, which species is thrown when you click-and-drag on an island with multiple species (you can’t tell before activating the throw because all of their “about to be thrown” animations play, yet only the pigs get thrown), etc., and then you can begin actually solving the puzzle. It’s needlessly frustrating, and I’m sure it’d only take just one lower-difficulty level to show the player all of this instead of forcing the player to ignore the main objective and experiment with the new animal. Or better yet, just stick with a few mechanics and make gradually trickier puzzles with them instead of continually jangling keys in front of the player’s face, but I guess that’s asking too much.

Overall, despite the spastic difficulty curve and unclear introduction of gimmicks, the genuinely challenging puzzles (I even looked up a hint for 3-19) combined with the game’s low base price of just five dollars (even lower on mobile) make this a game I can recommend paying for (and if you got it when it was free, that’s all the more reason to give it a shot).