The game follows the same plot as the film, only that the player gets involved as a newcomer to the barnyard.
This game contains examples of:
- Adaptational Ugliness: The coyotes here are not only scrawny, but mangy and hairless aside from the back of their necks, moreso resembling hyenas.
- Bizarre and Improbable Golf Game: The Gopher Golf minigames. How many other golfing games involve you controlling a gopher to manually redirect your cow's ball to the hole?
- Bragging Rights Reward: After completing the game, you can visit the junkyard, which has been locked off for most of the game until now. However, there isn't anything to do there besides ride your bike over the ramps.
- Character Customization: The playable cow can either be male or female with different kinds of skin.
- Collection Sidequest: The pages for Pig's cookbooks and mocktail recipes were stolen by raccoons and buried under rocks that the player can find in the overworld. Each one unlocks a new meal or drink that the player can make for money.
- Cool Bike: The cow player gets a bike that can be upgraded later on.
- Cool Shades: The cow player gets a pair of sunglasses that are only used in certain squirting missions.
- Demoted to Extra: Dag, the Big Bad of the original movie, doesn't appear until the final minigame, right at the end of the story, with most of his plot relevance cut.
- In-Universe Game Clock: The game has a clock system that runs every 10-15 minutes that it changes between day and night. Some missions are required on either day or night.
- Lactating Male: You can play as a male cow and shoot milk from your udders.
- Minigame Game: The game is loaded with minigames.
- Nightmare Sequence: One minigame has your cow entering Freddy's dream to wake him up. It turns out to be a nightmare, with demonic versions of Freddy attempting to attack the chicken coup and eat the chickens, forcing your cow to protect them.
- Old Save Bonus: Exclusive to the PS2 version, having save files of Tak: The Great Juju Challenge, SpongeBob SquarePants: Lights, Camera, Pants! and Nicktoons Unite! unlocks a new type of cow, a 10% discount card for the shops, and a Yellow Hornet Bike.
- Pink Girl, Blue Boy: You can get one of two upgrades for your bike; a girly pink one and a sleek blue one.
- Purely Aesthetic Gender: You can play as a male or female cow, but there are no gameplay differences between genders.
- Playable Epilogue: After you beat the coyotes, you're allowed to go back into the game to recollect any missing items you've missed out. Otis also gives you the key to the junkyard.
- Rascally Raccoon: Raccoons regularly menace the farm. Before the events of the game, they stole the pages for Pig's recipe books (forcing the player to find them again), and several minigames have them attempting to steal the farmer's crops.
- Version-Exclusive Content: The PS2 version has an Old Save Bonus: having save files of Tak: The Great Juju Challenge, SpongeBob SquarePants: Lights, Camera, Pants! and Nicktoons Unite! unlocks bonus in-game features. Interestingly, this feature was not present in the Nintendo GameCube version despite all of these games being released on that system as well.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential:
- You can spray the other animals with milk just to be a jerk.
- One minigame, "Tease Mrs. Beady", has you repeatedly teasing and tormenting Mrs. Beady by dancing outside the window while she desperately tries to get her husband to catch you dancing (to no avail). The poor woman ends up fainting from the sheer stress of it all!
- Wham Episode: Chapter 5: Coyote Attack marks a drastic shift in the game's tone when Ben, who'd been your mentor for the first four chapters, dies at the paws of the coyotes.