Parents' Guide to Them's Fightin' Herds

Herbivores clash in this colorful 2D fighting game. Them's Fightin' Herds bucks the normal fighting game trends by exclusively featuring hooved-animals as the playable characters. While the cast is very small for the genre at only seven characters, the game does a good job of making every one feel unique and fun to play as and against. Each character has three attack buttons, and a fourth button devoted to unique magic actions. The different attack buttons can chain into each other, making it easy to form basic combos as you go from Light to Medium to Heavy attacks. The magic option is more diverse, ranging from an extra attack option to something that affects the wider battlefield like Paprika's items. There are also 3 supers to use per character, with everyone having a basic combo ender, a buff, and a high damage cinematic combo option.

The game's single player offering is a 2D adventure game story mode that incorporates the normal fighting game battles when you run into enemies on the map. Currently the game features only one chapter of this story mode, with more to be released in the future. This chapter is pretty substantial by itself, and does a good job of easing you into important concepts for the multiplayer. The tutorial and training mode are both excellent, and do even more to help new players understand the deeper mechanics that make the multiplayer fun to play. The online experience is solid, and despite the lack of a ranked mode, most players should still be able to enjoy the excellent gameplay. The combos tend to run long compared to your average fighter, and with a smaller spread of playable characters you are going to find less variety than most other games in the genre, but the battle system is well thought-out and fun to engage with at any skill level. Despite being a smaller than average game, Them's Fightin' Herds is a creative and unique fighter that is well worth experiencing.