Ultimate Sheep Raccoon

What Is Ultimate Sheep Raccoon?

Ultimate Sheep Raccoon is a multiplayer bike-racing party game from Clever Endeavour Games, the studio behind the well-regarded course-building party game Ultimate Chicken Horse. The core loop is familiar to fans of that earlier title: players take turns placing obstacles, ramps, and hazards on a shared course, then race through it together, with the twist here being that everyone races on bikes rather than platforming individually, and scoring is based on finishing position rather than survival. Supporting up to four players locally, online, or in cross-platform lobbies, with a built-in level editor and PvP and co-op modes, it launched on 9 December 2025 at NZ$28.99. Reception has been genuinely mixed — 45% positive across 205 reviews — and almost every review, positive or negative, frames its assessment in direct comparison to Ultimate Chicken Horse.

That comparison is unavoidable and largely fair, since the developer is explicitly building on its own prior success rather than starting from scratch, but it also sets an unusually high bar that a meaningful share of the launch audience feels the game hasn't cleared.

Controls and Power-Up Balance Are the Central Complaint

The most consistent, detailed criticism across the review sample concerns how the game feels to actually play. Multiple reviewers describe the bike controls as "loose," "floaty," and lacking the snappy precision of Ultimate Chicken Horse's platforming, with the tilt function in particular singled out as unintuitive by more than one player. One long, detailed review lays out a specific structural issue: in the original game, "you want to strike a balance in making the goal hard to reach but leaving at least one possible path open," creating tension between players. In Ultimate Sheep Raccoon, by contrast, "the placeable objects aren't very interesting and most boil down to making the end easier to reach" — removing the adversarial tension that defined the format.

The power-up system draws similarly pointed criticism. Reviewers report that certain power-ups (an umbrella and a jetpack come up repeatedly) are dramatically stronger than the alternatives, turning what should be a strategic choice into what one reviewer calls "a knowledge check of picking the best power up," while others report specific broken interactions — a double-jump power-up that reviewers say frequently fails to register or double-triggers unpredictably. A detailed post-update review from several months after launch still lists unbalanced power-ups as an open issue, noting some options "can clear half the map when used right" while others remain "underwhelming."

A Meaningfully Reduced Toolset Compared to the Developer's Earlier Game

Beyond moment-to-moment feel, several reviewers point to a significant reduction in customization compared to Ultimate Chicken Horse: the ability to set the number of rounds, adjust round length, or control the probability of specific items spawning has reportedly been removed entirely. One detailed review lists this alongside the absence of an "end turn" button — a small but functionally important option in the original that let players skip a turn when no useful placement was possible, now missing here, which can extend already-tight rounds unnecessarily when a player is stuck. A separate criticism concerns progression: reviewers report needing to complete a large number of matches to unlock new maps, which several found frustrating in a party game genre that typically benefits from immediate variety rather than gated content.

Bug reports are common across the sample and specific rather than vague: players failing to respawn and being left in control of an empty bike, the tutorial's control scheme reportedly differing from the in-match default, UI elements disappearing mid-match, camera inconsistency in multiplayer, and at least one detailed account of a full lobby softlock requiring a player to quit out before the match could continue. One reviewer with over 12 hours logged still reports "multiple races losing bugs" per session as of a review posted several months after launch.

Signs of Real Improvement, but a Reputation That's Hard to Shake

To its credit, the pattern across the review sample suggests genuine post-launch progress. A review posted roughly two months after launch describes a major update that fixed a number of bugs, clarified confusing UI elements like trick displays and hardcore mode, reworked physics, and added new hazard types — concluding with "a very loose" but real thumbs up, calling the game "a step in the right direction." More recent reviews continue to acknowledge outstanding issues around map length, power-up balance, and player positioning fairness, but the overall tone shifts from launch-week frustration toward cautious, qualified recommendation for players willing to accept a party game still finding its footing. A handful of more recent reviewers simply enjoy it on its own terms, without constant reference to the predecessor: "it gets a lot of hate but its genuinely fun, so give it a try, its cheap too."

Whether that improvement is enough depends heavily on expectations. Reviewers who come in expecting a direct, feature-complete continuation of Ultimate Chicken Horse are more likely to be disappointed by the reduced customization and rougher edges; those willing to treat it as a distinct, still-maturing game in its own right report a genuinely fun, if imperfect, party experience.

Final Verdict

Ultimate Sheep Raccoon is a case of a developer's own high bar working against it — the bike-racing twist on the Ultimate Chicken Horse formula is a reasonable idea, and post-launch updates have genuinely improved the experience, but floaty controls, an unbalanced power-up economy, and a significantly reduced customization suite compared to its predecessor mean it still asks a lot of patience from players expecting the tightly tuned chaos of the original. At full price it's hard to recommend over simply playing Ultimate Chicken Horse instead; picked up on a discount by a group willing to meet it on its own terms, there's a genuinely fun party game underneath the rough edges.