Funky Barn is a plain and simple game about farming. With less than an abundance of casual games on the Wii U right now, this game has a chance to stand out from the crowd.  Sadly, the only thing that differentiates Funky Barn from other farming games is the level of boredom it brings.

Funky Barn’s story is simple: a farmer dies and his farm is left to you. Immediately, the first problem with this game arises, as the load time is just as long as the opening cut-scene, one you see every time you load the game. This cut-scene of poorly drawn pictures is a long one, over 45 seconds, and becomes more annoying each time you endure it.

The objective in Funky Barn is to successfully run a barn. After choosing the difficulty level, you begin a seemingly endless tutorial. At first, the game drip-feeds you content by having you level up your farm. Leveling requires a quality farm, which is graded by how many of the goals you have reached for the stage, such as “buy four pigs.” As you level up, you unlock more features such as new animals. You can earn more money to buy new items which are mostly plants or building to help towards leveling up until reach the max level. Leveling up usually does not take that long if you are a good farmer. The controls during this are serviceable. There are three options to play the game: touch screen, buttons, or both, but the only differences are in how you move the map. There is a bit of strategy involved in managing a successful farm. Storms, alien invasions, and other hazards can hurt your profitability, as money has to be spent fixing damages. There are defense mechanisms that can be purchased, but your farm needs a lot of money to afford them. To have your animals continue to produce goods (eggs, milk etc) they need to be kept happy. Happiness can be obtained by placing items on the farm like trees, or petting a poorly rendered 3D model of the animal on the GamePad screen. When it comes to replay value there are 3 levels of difficulty and multiple challenge farms, but differences are negligible.

Funky Barn is extremely repetitive. Like many simulation games, it involves you doing the same things over and over again however nothing Funky Barn does make these tasks fun. There are no worthwhile rewards, interesting characters, or anything of interest, really. Mundane tasks are the only order of the day: rescue Chickens out of the water, shoo animals by talking into the GamePad microphone. The repetitiveness makes Funky Barn very boring. Any entertainment value present in the game lasts for an hour at best. The visual design of the game is ugly with nothing on the cartoony farm being remotely interesting to look at.

If you want to “get funky” please select a different farm. Funky Barn starts off decent, but a little bit of playing will make you realize that it is a boring game that offers nothing of substance. Unless you are a fan of low quality farming games, I would have to say this is one Wii U title worth skipping