Herdy Gerdy has a unique concept, but its execution ends in utter failure.
Poor, poor Core Design. Coming off the crazed success of the Tomb Raider series on the PlayStation, the developer decided to take a break from Lara Croft and produce a few original titles. Herdy Gerdy, alongside Thunerstrike: Operation Phoenix and Project Eden, is one of the games that Core Design has released before the focus moves on Lara once again. Unfortunately, Herdy Gerdy does not exactly allow the developer to bow out with the bang that they were hoping.
The premise behind Herdy Gerdy is certainly unique. Gerdy awakes one morning to discover that his father absolutely will not wake up. Normally Gerdy wouldn’t care, but today is the problem is especially troubling: the grand herding tournament is about to begin. Tromping off to a nearby village, Gerdy alerts Grandma of the dilemma. She tells Gerdy to talk to the town elder, Yggdrasil. He informs Gerdy that an evil sorcerer has put his father under a sleeping spell. Gerdy must embark on a quest to win the herding tournament his father was supposed to enter or else the island Gerdy lives on will be surrounded in darkness and his father will never recover from his slumber.
Seems like the perfect setup for an action adventure. No, no. Herdy Gerdy is quite the opposite. Instead, in order to progress through the game you must herd various animals into their respective pens, and at the same time avoiding the dangerous Gromps that inhabit the land. If nothing else, Core Design should be commended for coming up with a game design that has yet to be even touched upon in a game before. It’s too bad that the actual gameplay didn’t pan out accordingly. Herdy Gerdy ends up becoming an exercise in boredom and frustration.
Herding is a novel enough idea when the game begins. It is when you discover that for hour after hour this is all that you will be doing. Yes, Core Design has come up with different ways to go about herding: different environments, new animals that require a certain approach, etc. But the bottom line is that you are still herding and it is hard to stay interested for very long. When chasing animals down, running them in an intelligible path requires all sorts of random running around in every which way. And it’s also convenient how the game does not explain how once a pen is full, the animals will refuse to run anywhere near it. Took me a good 20 minutes to figure that one out.
It does not help that the tools the game gives you to guide the animals along in a path toward the pen are nearly impossible to work. Not only does it do a piss poor job of explaining their purpose but when actually are put into action, half the time they don’t even work. Slap that magic stick that is supposed to gather nearby animals into a group into the ground and half the doops (the first creature you come across) will gladly poop on a nearby fence instead of heading your call. In an attempt to mix up the action are the Gromps, pink bear-like creatures that will eat any animal it comes across. Many times the Gromps can be avoided by pushing them into traps, but the gameplay becomes decently interesting when you have to stealthily come up with a way to pass them.
As soon as the introduction started playing, I did have to give credit to Core Design for coming up with an impressive artistic style and animation system for Herdy Gerdy. Watching Gerdy run around and talk with the villagers had me fairly impressed at times. What is too bad is that this is limited to the game’s cut-scenes only. The rest of Herdy Gerdy looks as if it could have been produced on an original PlayStation. You will be thankful when the game’s frame rate hits somewhere near 30; the engine enjoys struggling through the cartoon environments in the teens. I’m all for smooth animation, but I would have gladly traded some of it of Core Design could have spent more time on the rest of the visual presentation.
Lastly, it seemed Core Design completely forgot that gamers do not enjoy sitting through excessive load times. Heck, upon booting up the game, you have to sit through five minutes of loading before even reaching the main title screen. This type of behavior wouldn’t be too uncommon if Herdy Gerdy was running on a CD-ROM, but if Core Design went through the effort to get Herdy Gerdy on a DVD, why not take advantage of what it has to offer?
Core Design obviously had some original ideas ready for implementation in Herdy Gerdy, but the execution falls way short. The graphics are stylistic, but run horribly in the game’s engine; the gameplay is interesting, but repetitive; the animal AI is way out of whack; and the list goes on and on. Maybe next time, Gerdy.
