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The internet video phenomenon about cute, cuddly, giggly, and adorable animals who are often gruesomely shredded and skewered in ultra-violent displays of comedic anarchy. Now, it’s a videogame for multiple consoles, so you can enjoy not only watching the whole gang get torn from limb to limb, you can be a part of it!

Happy Tree Friends False Alarm is an action-puzzle game with a unique physics-based reactive environment. The game enables players to control one of three characters: Flippy the emotionally tattered war-torn bear, Lumpy the dim-witted blue moose, and Handy the amputee beaver carpenter always eager to lend a helping limb. Using resources such as concrete, ice, gasoline, and nitroglycerin to augment the dynamic 3D environments, your goal is to save the Happy Tree Friends from hilarious disaster situations and their own bad luck. Play in 10 diverse levels designed exclusively for the Happy Tree Friends False Alarm game including mine shafts, candy factories and a museum, all of which are filled with outrageous outcomes and plenty of accidental mayhem!

Genre: Puzzle Action

Publisher: SEGA

Developer: Stainless Games

Online Play:

Local Play:

June 26, 2008 –
Happy Tree Friends became an Internet sensation at the beginning of the decade. It’s grown so popular that it has earned a foray into videogames. What better place for a tale of cute critters being eviscerated than Xbox Live Arcade. Though the words “happy” and “tree” appear in the title, HTF is a cartoon geared towards emotionally underdeveloped adults and is not for kids. The videogame version is packed with gruesome maiming and comic dismemberments. It’s rated “M” for a reason.

Taking a cue from Lemmings, Happy Tree Friends: False Alarm is a puzzle game that tasks gamers with guiding a quintuplet of accident-prone woodland creatures through a maze of traps to a safety zone. You have no direct control of the Tree Friends. Instead, you act as a demi-god, utilizing four powers (fire, water, nitro and action) to affect the environment and control the tempo of the Tree Friends’ march.

Often these interactions are simple. Use “action” on a button to open a door or patch a hole in a pipe with water/ice. On occasion there are slightly more complex actions. You may need to stoke a fire to turn on an air vent that neutralizes some poison and then turn around to ice the fire once the toxin has dissipated. It never gets terribly challenging in terms of what needs to be done to solve a particular danger. The hard part is managing the progress of the Tree Friends.

If the HTFs are about to walk into a meat grinder, use the water power to freeze them in blocks of ice. This way you can search for a way to shut down the machine and spare yourself from having to watch the little guys be crushed. Okay, you may want to let one through just to for a laugh, but the rest you can freeze. More often you will want to speed up your little buddies by lighting a fire behind them. As we all know, the best way to get a forest animal to move is to threaten him with fire. Not only can some added speed help get your Tree Friend past timed hazards (oh you cursed moving saw blades), but it also gets you to the goal faster.

Click here to watch “ring the alarm.”

There is a timer. If a Tree Friend takes too much damage he dies and you’re penalized some time. Though it’s most fun to see the Tree Friends split in half, it’s best to try and get all five through safely. This is not so easy, because the AI is simply horrendous. In Lemmings, you could count on each lemming following one specific law: you will always move forward. HTF screws you far more than you will ever screw up on your own.

Sometimes, for no good reason, a Tree Friend will just turn around and head the wrong way or walk into a corner of the architecture and fall through the world. He won’t die, so your only option is a restart. Other times the HTF won’t react to fire at all or it will make them shoot off in an unexpected direction. Or they will run into the fire even though it is designed as something they are supposed to run from. The only times I ever failed to complete any of the 30 levels in HTF is when the AI decided to bug out and do something unfair.

If not for the AI issues, the challenges would be a breeze. You can complete and even master all levels in just a few hours. Your reward for beating HTF is a special videogame-themed episode. It’s hilarious and is a must for Happy Tree fanatics and anyone who likes a good laugh.

Closing Comments
Happy Tree Friends is a decent game that will please fans, but will end up boring most gamers. The difficulty never really ramps up from level 1 to level 30 and the levels are so short, you’ll be done before dinner’s ready. Everyone should check out the bonus episode unlocked by beating Happy Tree Friends, but it’s hard to recommend you pay $10 for that privilege.

IGN Ratings for Happy Tree Friends: False Alarm (X360)

Rating Description

out of 10
click here for ratings guide

6.0
Presentation
It’s nice to have a new episode included as a bonus, but there’s nothing else beyond the main game to introduce n00bs to the world of HTF.

5.5
Graphics
Though it’s both cute and gory, this is about as simplistic as videogames get visually.

4.0
Sound
The Tree Friends don’t speak — they squeak. The music is purposefully aggravating.

6.5
Gameplay
It’s a good concept, but the puzzles are far too easy to solve. Using bad AI to up the challenge is unfair.

4.0
Lasting Appeal
You can blaze through all 30 levels in about two hours and can likely get gold in each with a second playthrough.

6.2
Passable
OVERALL
(out of 10 / not an average)

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