Parent's Guide: Funky Barn - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

Funky Barn is a management type game, in which you run a small farm, taking it from a bare and barren field into a thriving business. Mainly centred around animals, you'll be caring for chickens, cows and sheep (as well as more unconventional alpacas and buffalo) and flogging the produce they create to feed your growing enterprise.

In the beginning, you'll find yourself spinning a lot of virtual plates - picking up and selling every single egg your chickens churn out, dropping fluffy sheep into the shearing machine and making sure everyone has enough food and water all take their toll on your time. There's also natural disasters to contend with, which can plough through your farm destroying fences and buildings, sending your animals running amok. As time goes on and you accumulate more cash, many aspects can be automated with the help of machines, but the first hour or so can be pretty hectic - perhaps too hectic for a young child to properly cope with.

That said, it is definitely a much simplified example of the genre, and as long as you make sure they have plenty to eat and drink, some shelter and a couple of trees, most animals will be perfectly content and continue to produce indefinitely; you just have to keep up with the selling. Your animals may leave if they're not happy, but you get regular shipments of new animals from the stork anyway, so it shouldn't matter too much if you lose one or two - and if you're short of cash, you can stroke the animals to happiness and they'll produce pretty much instantly too. It's worth keeping in mind that there are lot of text pop-ups to read, though, whether it's your assistant explaining something, or a fellow farmer wanting to trade, so a being a confident reader is a requirement.

If your child has enjoyed similar games before, whether it's Zoo Tycoon, Farmville or even Harvest Moon, they may well appreciate Funky Barn - although there is a chance that it may be a bit overwhelming at first. But if they have the patience and determination to stick it out for a while, they'll find things will get substantially easier as your farm grows.

As you'd expect from a game with quite as many smiling animals on the front cover, Funky Barn has nothing untoward inside at all; after all, there's nothing much you can do to make a farming game that's all that 'mature' anyway. Perhaps the only concern is the predators - foxes that can take your sheep, weasels that can kidnap your pigs and aliens that can abduct your cows. There's no blood, guts or death though; the predators simply appear, grab onto an animal and then disappear down their burrow with your livestock - and you can always place a dog kennel in the affected animal pens to chase off the predators. You can't send your animals off to be slaughtered, and your animals can't die if you don't feed them either; they simply fly off into the stratosphere, presumably heading off to a farm where they'll be treated better - and, luckily, they also don't mate, so there'll be no awkward questions at the dinner table.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Nintendo Wii U