Nothing says “shear terror" like a good old fashioned brother vs. brother llama farm cannon battle, and Fleeced! – Shear Terror (developed by Bight Interactive Inc.) delivers that action in spades. This is the a revamp of the “castle defense" genre that absolutely works, and it even comes with online multipalyer.
The premise of Fleeced is quite unique, to say the least. You control one of two brothers in the midst of a hardcore sibling rivalry, and they’ve decided to settle their rivalry by setting up fragile llama pens about 100 feet from one another and firing cannons at each other. In a completely unrelated incident, there is one “llama rustler" prowling around the outskirts of both brothers’ pens, and any time a wall is brought down by cannon fire they’ll pounce on the unsuspecting llamas and shear some of their valuable fur.
Victory can be achieved in these 1v1 faceoffs by opening up your opponent’s wall repeatedly to let in their local llama rustler in enough times to fully shear the llama. I have absolutely no idea why making your brother’s llama naked would make you victorious in anything, but that ridiculous plot setup makes for an extremely fun, competitive game.
As an angry llama farmer, you have several options available to you in your battle against your brother. There are four different types of cannons that can be built, but building a cannon will cost you several coins. Luckily for you, coins randomly apparate within your llama pen at a constant rate throughout each match, so all you’ll need to do is run over these coins using the on-screen dpad to pick them up. The walls of your pen will require constant maintenance as your brother attacks him with his cannon fire, but repairing them is as easy as walking over to the wall in question and tapping the “repair" button, and repairs don’t cost a player any coins.
The actual act of firing a purchased cannon on your brother is an interesting event in which the game camera follows behind the slow-flying cannonball and tilt controls are used to direct the ball’s flight path to a desirable impact point (preferably right in the middle of two walls right near the ever-prowling rustler; hitting a wall right in front of the rustler allows him quick access to your opponent’s soon-to-be-nude llama). The tilt controls work extremely well, and after only a few games nearly anyone will be able to master them without trouble. Fleeced uses some extremely intelligent auto-calibration so you’ll be able to play the game even wile laying in bed without problem. This is a feature that I cannot express enough my appreciation for, and more developers (I’m looking at you, Super Monkey Ball dev team) should take note.
Cannons and walls can be upgraded, but in my experience the game’s balancing was a little bit off in both of these areas, as the reward for delving into the upgrade system really wasn’t ever worth the cost. Fully upgraded walls are still pretty weak comparitively, and it would cost dozens upon dozens of coins– coins that could be better spent on more cannons– to upgrade all the walls in a pen (especially in the single player game’s later levels, where the llama pens become enormous and difficult to manage).
The single player mode is really more of an introduction to Fleeced than anything else, especially given its incredibly short length. The real draw in Fleeced is the arcade mode, where players can face either an A.I. opponent or their friends via wi-fi, bluetooth, or even internet connections. Arcade mode lets players set perimeters like the size/shape of their llama pens and strength of the wind during the game (which will determine how hard it will be to steer your cannon shots into their targets). It’s worth mentioning that when selecting to play online, a popup message that says “Internet play is free for a limited time" appears. Assumedly due to the negative feedback that this message generated, Bight Interactive has confirmed in our forums that online play will always be free, and that the scary message will soon be removed.
While I hope that a little bit of balancing to make upgrading walls and cannons more of a worthwhile investment will be done in a future update, it’s safe to say that Fleeced! – Shear Terror is already a great multiplayer game. The quirky art style melds extremely well with the high-quality 3D environments, and the game ran consistently smoothly for me. Fleeced is worth every penny of its asking price.
App Store Link: Fleeced! – Shear Terror, $3.99
