Cleared on May 3rd, 2024

I’m not going to pretend to be a film critic with high standards and say that Barnyard is a terrible film because I really love the movie. It does heavily play off tropes seen in other animated films like Lion King and Toy Story, the tone shift can feel jarring at points such as the emotional apex of the film being followed up a few minutes later with a dance number and boy tipping, and don’t even get me started on the male cow udders. But I just love how chaotic and surreal it is just from cows doing stupid shit alone, but it also has some surprising emotional weight to it and there’s a sincere effort in its storytelling and characters. Plus, it’s one of the few movies to use its pop culture songs exceptionally well and even helps to capture the American culture with farmlands, the personalities, and wild parties.

I’ve been aware of the game based on the movie for a long time, but I didn’t think much of it besides the fact that you can squirt milk. I would’ve thought of it as just a run of the mill licensed game, but as I learned more about it through gameplay and archives of a streamer I watch regularly, I realized there might actually be more to it, and it was… high quality? And it’s not even me being nostalgically attached to the characters or the movie because it turns out I’m not alone on it. How is that even possible?

A key aspect of Barnyard and its TV series is goofing around and having wild parties, and since there’s so much going on in the movie, making it into a collection of minigames on top of the core gameplay would make the most sense. But I think what makes Barnyard more interesting is that they didn’t just make it where you go from one level to the next, but made the game an open world where you have to manually move your character from one point to the next in order to do the next mission. The world itself doesn’t feel too small that it's confined, but it’s not even that large where it feels more like a glorified loading screen than it does actually playing the game, and there’s a lot to do in the world. You can explore for recipe rocks across the world, and find notes on trees and fences for game tips with the earlier ones seeming blatantly obvious, but later ones may even prove useful and give you some lore tidbits that the movie or even the TV series never really touch on. You can go to the vegetable farm to collect crops which are all used for recipes except for cabbage because it’s nasty, you can collect an egg a day from the chickens, and you can go honey collecting in a stealth minigame to hide from the bees and steal honey from the bees which could then be used for recipes. And there are a few secrets across the world that even I haven’t found all of, yet, so if exploration is your thing, it’s bound to keep you interested.

The game follows a mission based structure and all of them are mandatory, even ones that have you playing minigames. The game has a day and night cycle which lasts in real time around 15 minutes. You’re not actually playing as Otis or any of his friends this time around, but instead you’re playing as an OC (Original Cow) named, gendered, and customized to your choice. My character is a female angus named Milla because if I’m going to be staring at cow ass throughout the game and squirting milk, then it might as well be a girl. Also, I don’t even think the milk that comes out of the guys is actually… anyway, you do missions for the characters. Some can be as simple as fetch quests, others may have you putting your squirting skills to use, and others will have you play minigames. The core gameplay is, of course, the one where you control the cow on two legs. It does feel heavy at first to the point where I thought my emulator was running the game slowly, but you get used to it after a while. Once you get sunglasses, you can proceed to squirt milk which is only really applicable for a few minigames. You can also fuck with the characters and squirt on them. It should be noted that it has only five ammo until you are able to acquire a milk container on the ground which can be quite inconvenient if you find yourself far away from a container when you need it most. You can also lock on your enemies, so it ends up feeling like a third person shooter in a sense.

The minigames themselves are quite a lot, and if I go over all of them in detail, we’d be here all day. But to give you a brief rundown.
Mud Jumpers has you on a platform spinning pipes and timing your jumps and kicks to avoid getting knocked off. It’s a game about choosing your reaction and preparing for whatever move your foe makes. It’s an easy game to understand.
Sharp Squirters has you shoot at cans laid out across the area. The more cans you shoot within a short time frame, the better your score will be.
Barnyard Pool is a simple game of pool, but the catch is that you have two different color of balls assigned to both you and Duke (your opponent). If you shoot Duke’s color into the hole, it is considered a foul and he gets two free turns. However, it is possible for him to do the same by accident and you get two free turns. If either of you shoot the white ball into the hole, it’s also a foul, and if you directly touch the black ball before clearing all out all of your colors, it’s a foul. It’s not that hard, but you will need good accuracy for a high score.
Tease the Mailman and its variant Tease Ms. Beady has you performing poses through a series of button presses and then dropping down when the Mailman or Mr. Lump turns around. Doing 5 button prompts is ideal although if you think the mailman will turn around before you can complete the pose, you can opt to squeeze in a 3 or 4 button prompt pose.
Bike Racers has you race the Jersey Cows. You’ll be doing it quite a few times with different courses across the area, and you’ll luckily be accustomed to the controls since biking is how you’ll travel across the Barnyard, anyway.
Chasing Chicks has you picking up chicks and going to a designated target to throw them towards their coop. But it won’t be simple since you’ll be competing with Otis and later on the Jersey Cows for the most points. The latter won’t be as big of an issue as they may end up being busy squirting each other.
Vegetable Patch Defenders has you squirting at raccoons to stun them to allow you to throw them out and ensuring that at least 10 vegetables are not stolen. You also need to close the fences and prepare for raccoons that will attack you directly.
Honey Hunt has you going through a stealth mission to collect Honey. Unlike other minigames where you are competing for the high score, it will actually net you Honey which you can net up to 3 a day (in-game time, of course)
Chicken Coop Defenders has you protecting eggs against raccoons. You squirt them and throw them, but to get the high score, you need to let them steal eggs, intercept them, and go to a designated spot to throw the eggs. That is easier said than done, especially once the enemies start to outnumber you. Another variant involves the coyotes trying to steal the chicks, but you cannot throw the coyotes.
Chicken Launcher is where you launch Peck and have him fly through rings and at the end fly through windows. It’s one of the cooler minigames on paper, but in execution, it might just be one of the worst because of how sensitive Peck’s aerial controls are. It becomes difficult for precise movement and trying to get the best window for the high score takes a lot of trial and error.
Gopher Golf is a recurring one that they will have you play six times… yeah, the game sure loves its golf. It’s not your traditional golf or even mini-golf for that matter. What you have to do is tee-off and then let the gophers steer the ball to the goal. For the first four missions, it’s about how fast you can get the ball there although getting a hole-in-one by some chance will allow you to gain an extra life which will net you extra points. However, the last two golf missions are about making the shot in as few shots as possible. The final golf mission is such bullshit, and I didn’t even get a star because of how difficult the layouts are. Also, Hole 14 in general is ass. It has a guide hole that you need to aim at up on a slope, I got it into the guide hole and it can still bounce off of it.
Whack-A-Rac is one of the few actually optional mini-games that has you whack raccoons, but because Freddy is looking for Peck in the machine, he will pop up every now and then and should be avoided. Also eggs and chicken will also pop up and those need to be avoided too, but coyotes will pop up and those definitely need to be hit for the high score.
Joy Ride has you going on a ride in the farmer’s truck to race against the Jersey Cows on Ms. Beady’s car. It’s not that difficult, but it’s another one of those games that they have you do very often.
Milk Bar has you sliding milkshakes onto the customers to knock them back into the curtains. If they aren’t far away enough, they’ll throw a glass at you that you need to pick up or else you lose points. If you’ve ever played the retro game known as Tapper, that’s basically the same idea.
Barnyard Darts is another optional minigame where you can challenge Root to a game of darts. You have your own color to shoot and so does he. If you hit the enemy color, Root gets points. Now since his AI is so good, he will never hit your target and always hit his, but even if you hit one or two of his targets, you can actually gang up on him in points if you shoot early since it will give you an additional 10 points. Meanwhile, Root will only net around 2 points from the time bonus at most
Cow Tipping has you launch tomatoes at kids trying to tip cows like in the movie in order to scare them off, but another variant has you stopping raccoons and unlike the kids, they will actually try to put up a fight. There is one more variant of the minigame, but it is actually the game’s final boss against Dag, and it’s… well, not very good, but most of my problem stems from the annoying music although once you figure out you can lower the music volume by 1 star, crank up the speech volume by 5 stars, and turn on You Gotta Move by Aerosmith (the song that played during the final battle of the movie), it’s not so much of an issue. But the fact I had to rely on outside music to enhance the experience does not add any points.

There’s some good songs in the soundtrack although it seems like many of them are ripped from outside sources such as instrumentals from other songs, and I don't know how many of them are even original. There are some day time songs that show up, but the problem is that I don’t think I’ve ever heard any of them because the bike music during the daytime will override any song playing and either pause or reset the current song (I don’t remember which) and you’ll be spending a lot of your time in-game on the bike. For some reason, that rule does not apply when riding a bike at night and the overworld song plays as normal. Apparently there’s a good amount of unused songs in the game, and supposedly more songs exclusive to the Wii version of the game.

There is an incentive to try to explore the area and get the highest score in minigames. If you manage to get a star rank on at least 20 minigames, you can be crowned the Barnyard Champion surpassing even Otis. There are Gopher Coins you can acquire through missions and breaking crates which allow you to buy equipment to enhance the barnyard during the night. Other than two minigames, they are merely cosmetic, and you can’t even play pinball since the partygoers are always hogging the game. I don’t even think you can even ride the mechanical human for that same reason, but I never bothered to check if you can. You could bust a move on the dance floor, though. The purpose of it, though, is to get you additional awards including milkweeds which will take you to secret areas for more coins and other secrets and bonus content as well as Gold Rush tokens which you can head for a stump around the map to start a coin trail that you will need to follow under a time limit. Some stumps net more than others and the best one is near the junkyard which will net 200 gopher coins. When you get to 100% barn completion, you get to be the Number One Party Animal once again surpassing even Otis.

If that sounds like some mary sue plot where you just inserted yourself into the plot of Barnyard… well, at least it takes place in its own canon and being a video game, it does get away with it. It follows the plot of the movie, and I wouldn’t say it's “abridged”. It even adds in a few things not in the movie like the raccoon problem, but some of the cooler moments of the movie happened off-screen and seemingly in an instant. The characters are there and they are in character for the most part, but they don’t really feel at their best. Doesn’t exactly help that their character models are uhh… let’s just say reeks of PS2 that much I can say. Of course it is a 6th generation game, so it’s not to say it’s a bad thing, but at the same time, you do need to come to terms that this is a PS2 game from 2006. Also, there is limited voice acting in this one. I understand there’s a lot of dialogue, but it feels weird that they have audio at the beginning of each conversation and then again at the end. I feel like it would’ve been better if they had full audio for the actual important scenes. In case you’re wondering, all of the voice actors from the movie are all intact, even Kevin James as Otis when he would later be voiced by Chris Hardwick in the TV series, although I don’t think that was a tall order in this case since they didn’t have many lines they need to say.

What I love about this game is that it manages to capture what I love about the movie in the first place. At one point it’s a chaotic madhouse of partying and games, but another, it can feel calm and atmospheric like staring off into the moon on top of Ben’s Hill at night while listening to beautiful acoustic music. Fun fact, staring off into the moon was how I accidentally found two notes and a recipe rock that I likely would not have found on my own otherwise. I never found myself bored even when playing it for 8 hours straight at one point because there is just so much to do. Different ways to optimize your gold gain, the new areas to explore, and all of the minigames. There is unfortunately nothing left for the game once you become Barnyard Champion and Number One Party Animal. You could play minigames for the fun of it, try to scour for bonuses you haven't got yet, or maybe just replay the game 5 years from now and experience it all over again. But the journey was a lot of fun, and it’s already become one of my favorite licensed games of all time.

This game kicks ass. An open world sandbox where you can ride your bike anywhere. You can collect flowers, fruits, vegetables. You can cook and bake, make drinks. There are SO MANY MINIGAMES. The amount of content here is really solid. Most of the side content is decent fun as well. It has a decently long story that follows most of the film, plus it lets you create your own self insert character. The music is also pretty good.

It's just a really relaxing chill game to play. It makes you feel comfortable and warm when you run through the map. Very nostalgic.

It gets minor points off for golf being shitty. And they make you do golf so many times. But that's the only mode I didn't like. Really awesome game.