Ultimate Chicken Horse | Switch Review

Imagine you’re a squirrel competing in a parkour race around a pyramid in Egypt. You’re about to cross the finish line after jumping on a box your hippo friend put on the course, when suddenly a boxing glove pops out of the box and punches you backward. Before you can recover from your setback, a hockey puck machine hits you with a projectile from across the map and you die. Your only solace is that the raccoon that placed the hockey puck machine on the race track was burnt to a crisp by your flamethrower.

Cute Critters, Very Violent

Ultimate Chicken Horse is a 2D platforming race game in which you and your friends pilot your adorable characters across a map in an attempt to reach the finish line alive. The kicker: before each race everyone gets to place a booby trap OR helpful platform on the map. You are not immune to your own booby traps, just as you are not the only beneficiary of the helpful items you intend to use to win the race. While the critters are obviously being put through the ringer, the action and violence are very cartoony and, depending on your definition, arguably family-friendly. No blood, decapitation, dismemberment, etc. Just cartoon X’s over the eyes, and the comical protruding tongue upon ‘death’. 

Helping or Hurting?

As explained, the basic goal of the game is to get from start to finish unharmed while hoping your competition isn’t so lucky. One game of Ultimate Chicken Horse consists of several races to be run. Before each race begins, players are presented with a random assortment of items that they may place on the map. The map is shown in a grid format, and your objects may be put in the available grid spaces coinciding with the shape and size of your chosen object. Once everyone’s chosen object is placed on the map, the first race begins! After the first race, when everyone has either finished or died, there is another round of object choosing before the next race. Your selection consists of helpful objects designed to assist you on your journey as well as gruesome traps designed to impale, crush, incinerate, or otherwise bludgeon a cute animal so they can’t finish. Everyone picks an object at the same time, so be quick and grab the good stuff before someone else does! 

Simply Winning the Race Will Not Win the Game

There is a point system designed for the game so players are rewarded, not just for finishing the game, but also for being the most destructive player in the race. After each race, you’ll see the points tallied up on a kind of horizontal bar graph squiggled in crayon. You’ll get points for finishing the race, extra points for finishing first, and more bonus points for each player that fell prey to a trap you placed on the map. You might not be the fastest, but with enough violence, you may come out on top in the end. If the course failed to claim a single victim, and everyone made it to the end, well then congratulations on your pacifistic team work! But that’s not what the game wants and no one will be awarded ANY points at all due to the race being ‘too easy’. Additionally, you will not receive points from trapping your opponents if you yourself fail to complete the race. The cycle continues with choosing objects and running the course until a point limit is reached and a final winner is crowned. 

What’s the Difference Between a Horse and a Snake on a Skateboard?

None, according to Ultimate Chicken Horse character selection. The game creators designed each character to be identical in jumping/running ability regardless of the choice. Each avatar is adorable and able to platform like Mario. There are several of them to choose from, along with a few stylish accessories and an alternate skin style for each one. This helps with keeping track of your character while jumping along with several others on the same screen and avoiding an identity crisis. Like when I used to think I beat all my brothers with Samus because I forgot that I actually selected Bowser before a Super Smash Bros match, and my brother actually won since I was watching the wrong character and actually running off the map to my death the whole time. Stupid Derrick. Ultimate Chicken Horse‘s character customization does a good job of minimizing that risk. These customizations are unlocked via a box suspended with balloons that will appear on a certain map. From the map selection menu, a map with an unlockable customization balloon box is identified by a ‘?’ on its selection tile.

Rewards for Cleverness

Playing the game, I get a little nostalgic for The Incredible Machine, an old PC puzzle game where you fit different machine components and objects together to achieve a goal. Similarly, the objects and obstacles you can choose from can interact with each other in different ways. The honey, for example, is used to slow your opponents down and make it impossible for them to jump when placed on a flat surface, but the honey can also be used to stick a buzz saw onto a Ferris-wheel style elevator to gut a rotating saw of death! These types of interactions, along with the randomness of the items given, not to mention the imagination of several determined individuals, assure that no two games play out exactly the same. 

The music in the game is worth mentioning too. It’s cheesy and catchy in a big-brass-band style. Each map has its own music assigned to it, and recently my three year old son has started telling the Google assistant to “play Ultimate Chicken Horse music” and I’m not annoyed by it.

Price and Value

As of this review, Ultimate Chicken Horse is available on PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch and PC for $14.99, give or take the occasional sale. You can possibly get it, as I did, for as low as $7.99. The game features cross-platform multiplayer, along with map building and sharing capabilities. If you ever play multiplayer games with friends, or need something quick and simple to help keep your sanity at a family reunion, you can do a lot worse than this hilarious party game. 

This review is based on a purchased copy of Ultimate Chicken Horse on Nintendo Switch . It is also available on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC via Steam.