Sheep, Dog, 'n' Wolf Review (PS1)
One of the most uniquely designed puzzle platformers on the PlayStation 1, it deserves more recognition for its genius.
Developer: Infogrames Lyon House
Publisher: Infogrames
Release Date: 1st March 2001 (UK), 14th September 2001 (EU), 27th September 2001 (NA)
Platform: PlayStation, PC.
In the early 2000’s, Infogrames published a string of cartoon based video games, primarily Looney Tunes, and one of them was of a sort of lesser known character within the Warner Bros. looney bin. In 1953, Chuck Jones directed the short Don’t Give Up The Sheep which saw Ralph Wolf trying to steal off sheep guarded by Sam Sheepdog. And you might be thinking “But Ralph looks exactly like Wile E Coyote.” Yes, but no. Ralph has yellow eyes, scragglier fur, a red nose, wider legs (at least in one short he did), and sometimes a protruding fang while Wile E. is scrawnier, has a black nose and white eyes. Only six more shorts were released over the next 10 years but it seemed to have made enough of an impact to inspire a bunch of crazy frenchies at Lyon House of Infogrames to create this puzzle platforming comedy masterpiece.
Sheep, Dog ‘n’ Wolf (known as Sheep Raider in the US) has a very basic premise. Daffy Duck is hosting a game show called the Sheep Dog ‘n’ Wolf Show— or as he likes to call it “Who Wants to be a Sheep Stealer?”— and whisks Ralph Wolf away onto his set. All Ralph has to do is steal sheep over 15 levels in order to catapult Daffy to super stardom. Over each level, Ralph has to solve a series of puzzles with the appointed Acme gadgets given to him within the level and try not to get caught by Sam. Upon succesfully nabbing a sheep from under Sam’s fringed nose, Ralph has to place the sheep into a designated goal ring. Simple enough but the execution is deceptively clever. Along the way you also see cameos from other favourite Looney Tunes characters such as Road Runner, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, the nasty bull from Bully For Bugs, Marvin the Martian, Yosemite Sam, Gossamer, and Bugs Bunny himself! Well, sort of. You get to dress up as Bugs to fool Elmer. It’s fun!
So the core of the game is puzzle solving. You’re dumped into a set level to navigate around with mail boxes placed at specific points providing you with Acme parcels packed with gadgets you’ll need, sheep to entice watched over by Sam, and a goal point. The earlier levels are simple enough to solve with a straightforward tutorial but later on in the game things get cheekily trickier. You’ll really need to put on your thinking cap to solve these ones and really experiment around. Thankfully your experimentations will more often than not pay off rewardingly well making your headaches worth it. But the trickier the levels become, the more creative the puzzles are as well as the level design. There’s truly some genius game design behind this.
The Acme items you’ll pick up along the way will always have a use somewhere for something. Nothing is there to throw you off or confuse you as each one is there for a specific reason. So if you’re stumped on something somewhere, you just have to play with your gadgets elsewhere until you find its purpose. And there’s plenty of room to do so with a wide variety of toys to play with, each with multiple uses sometimes. There’s a rubber band that you can either latch onto a tree and bungie jump to steal a sheep below, or string it up between two trees, pull back on it and catapult yourself across a chasm. Some items can be combined together as well. There’s a fan which by itself might not be too useful, but combine its use with some fanciful perfume and blow the fumes towards a sheep and you can lure it your way. Actually I lied about the fan not being useful on its own. You can also use it to propel yourself on a barge to cross rivers. Because cartoon physics.
Some items aren’t Acme gadgets, like lettuce. You’ll find them placed about most of the levels by themselves, or Porky will lend you his bounty, so you may lay out a trail of snacks to lure sheep to where you want them to be. Also as cleverly, when you have your lettuce selected there’s a window that pops up highlighted purple when you place one down. If you move too far away the window will highlight red, meaning you’re just about out of range for the sheep to pick up this next piece of lettuce. So this really helps guage how far you want to distance your lettuce to ensure you’re stringing the sheep along. Additionally, there’s bushes you can hide inside of and sneak around in to get closer to the sheep. But the catalogue of Acme gadgets you can use are appropriately goofy.
The gameplay is very sharp for this game and incredibly cartoony. You can go first person to survey the area to get a better look at where you can go and what you want to do adverse from the standard camera, which sometimes can be a little stubborn to use. The action button will let you pick up and use items and pick up and carry sheep. You can double jump about. R1 lets you sneak, ideal for moving around Sam— which when you are in his vicinity, a window will pop up of him looking from left to right perpendicular to your position. If you’re caught in his line of sight he will bolt straight for you like a freight train, grab you by the throat and bonk you on the head. There’s a traffic light system to tell how close to danger you are around him; green means you’re ok, mostly. Orange means be vewy, vewy quiet as you sneak by or else it jumps to red which obviously means you’re spotted, so you better run away fast or else you get grabbed. Which you can! Tapping circle you can cartoonishly run away and it is easily one of the best game mechanics I’ve ever come across, especially in a cartoon game. You can run so fast you can even run across bottomless chasms, because cartoon physics. As long as you don’t look down you can defy gravity. In the opening level as Daffy runs through the tutorial with you, as you practice your running you can race against Road Runner and follow him into a tunnel. But it’s a Looney Tunes game and you’re chasing Road Runner, so you just go smack into the flase tunnel wall and stars whirl around your head. It’s wonderful. And you can just do this whenever. You can run about the level at your leisure and smash and crash into walls, cactus, boulders, and forever get that cartoonish impact and “whump whump” jingle.
Navigating the levels can be perilous as much as it can be rewarding, naturally for a platformer. If you explore around deep enough you’ll find secret time clocks which reward you with bonus points you can spend in the show’s main stage unlocking concept art and storyboards. Very lovely to look at. Of the level’s hazards, in certain areas there are minefields so if you’re not careful walking through one, you’re going to step on a mine and explode into black soot. So you gotta find the mine sweeper/metal detector in the level. Chances are you’ll have to leap over platforms, push a few blocks and boulders, or roll up a small snowball into a giant boulder to reach where the metal detector is.
One incredibly unique thing one of the levels has is time travel adding a whole other layer to puzzle solving. There’s a part where you need to get up to a tall ledge to get a time clock but there’s nothing about to get there. There is, however, a patch of dirt in the grass beneath it. Through Acme mail you can pick up a chronometer which will transport you through time into the far flung past where there’s an active volcano and dinosaurs about. There’s also a seed lying about. Plant this in the dirt in the past and head back to the present and now there’s a giant tree for you to climb.
There’s also a part where there’s a large open space with Sam and his sheep ahead of you, but you need something to hide behind to reach them. Hard to do when there’s nothing around to do so, except for a curious bundle of rocks you could hide behind. But there’s the chronometer! Travel back into the past and here you’ll see a line of boulders flung from the nearby volcano (I believe that’s how they got there anyway). Roll them onto designated positions on the field, travel back to the present, and time has whithered the boulders down to rocks for you to hide behind, which you so strategically placed for you to be able to sneak forward and reach Sam and his sheep! It’s genius! Sheer, unadulterated genius!
Now what good is a cartoon game if it doesn’t look like a cartoon? I don’t think it quite looks like a Chuck Jones short, but it unmistakably looks like something Looney Tunes anyway. The levels do look perfectly like a Jones background from his shorts, the characters are beautifully animated and appropriately bendy and stretchy which sells the slapstick humour wonderfully, and everyone looks spot on to how they should. The whole game is fantastic to look at and is absolutely an interactive cartoon. They did an exceptional job at that.
As with the sound design too. The music is ludicrously funky and jazzy adding a particular flavour to the game, and it never grates or becomes tiresome hearing the tracks over and over while you’re running about the set or figuring out what to do in a level. I feel the music may be underappreciated because it makes the whole game even more fun to play through. It’s such a joy to listen to. There are some sound effect glitches or inconsistencies I found, especially in the cutscenes but they’re nothing too distracting. Other sound effects, though, are incredibly cartoony and appropriate. The game also has veteran Looney Tunes voice actors playing their iconic parts. Joe Alaskey voices Daffy, Marvin the Martian and Gossamer, Bob Bergen voices Porky Pig, Maurice LaMarche voices Yosemite Sam, and Greg Burson voices Elmer Fudd. Having that layer of authenticity in the voices adds so much more to the game.
I had first played Sheep, Dog ‘n’ Wolf on the PlayStation Magazine demo disc 71 of May 2001 which lets you play the second level of the game. I also remember playing the 6th level of the game as a demo too. Doesn’t seem to show in the magazine that you can on that disc so it must have been on another later disc. But I remember being intimidated by Sam standing sentry stopping you from stealing his sheep and having to sneak by him in a bush. Once I had done that, 9 year old me felt a great sense of accomplishment, let alone progressing the level further. I was enamoured with the cartoony controls and it made you feel like you were controlling a cartoon character. It wasn’t until around 2014/2015 when I got the full game and playing through the entire thing I felt the exact thing, only with the addition of trying to use my brain more to solve the puzzles. It took a while to complete playing it on and off over the years, but when I had completed it I felt both rewarded for it but also a little bummed that it ended. But that’s ok because there’s the bonus levels I still need to do and it has great replayability to it, so you won’t get tired of it so easily going through multiple playthroughs. Also, bizarrely, after I did the final level and watched the credits, I was returned back to the set and was still shy 2 sheep and it said I hadn’t done level 14. I do not yet fully understand why that said I need to complete the last level again, perhaps because it doesn’t really save after completion, but it is an oddity to me.
Sheep, Dog ‘n’ Wolf is easily one of the best Looney Tunes games, PS1 games, and puzzle platformer games you can get your hands on. It has a great sense of humour fitting the Looney Tunes style with even greater animation, controls, and art design to sell it beautifully. It has imaginative and creative gameplay beckoning you to be experimental to solve its puzzles. The levels are genius in design and with additional bonus stages you can find tucked hidden away throughout the show’s set, or even entering the level from behind its entry door, you can try tackling some seriously difficult puzzles that will get you experimenting and scratching your noodle for hours. It’s got all the best stuff from platforming games and puzzle games all rolled up into one satisfying and rewarding bundle of cartoon calamity.
Where to Purchase (as of 12/09/22):
ebay: £8-£60/ $28-$200 ($800 for collectors items)
Amazon: $70-$180
CeX: £2.50-£30
Why are all your reviews of old games? I mean there are some crackers from back in the day but i want to see thoughts on newer titles. The mainstream reviewers are biased and paid off it's cuckoldry i tell ye! and we gamers need independant reviewers with honesty and integraty to show us what might be worth a buy and what is a load of shit. You have many indie titles on xbox/ps store like Isonzo where you can play as the germans! Thats worth a buy based on that alone so give that a whirl and unleash your inner hans! I also noticed that all your reviews are of games you like as they seem to get an excellent review everytime and that is biased. As a reviewer you need to review all types of games to help people with what they want to spend there hard earned cash on ( unless there foreign or a single mother as they get it handed to them ) those are the rules as a reviewer. Give us the technical details such as performance and if there are problems relating to that, graphical elements animation and more importantly immersion instead of a huge back story of the develper and when the studio opened and your life and when you first played the game and all that bullshit we're not interested in this stuff man give us the meat off the bone not the tinsel off the tree. The next reviews i wanna see is games like ww1 isonzo, the new call of duty, callisto protocal, high on life or last of us remastered.
Not sure why most of your reviews are of games many years old? Games most people have already played and know full well. As a reader I like to read reviews of new and upcoming games that I haven’t had the ability to play. As for the review itself, there’s a lot of unnecessary back story to your life which (and no offence) is quite irrelevant and can sometimes deter me from reading on. I came to read about the game, how it plays, any bugs, it’s performance, likes/dislikes, thoughts and a final verdict. This is just a long read on an old game, the pattern seems to be that the only games you review are games only you enjoy. Perhaps try broadening your library? Just my thoughts.