We spent some time checking out Bigpoint’s Farmerama this weekend, a free to play browser MMO that follows the traditional farming simulator theme where we get to build up our own farm, plant crops and breed animals. That’s the long and the short of it. It’s a fairly simple concept and one that has been done… quite a few times, most notably by Zynga’s Farmville that was released only a couple of months before Farmerama, though Farmerama has been a big success for Bigpoint.

Our foray into the game probably wasn’t quite as long as we would normally do and this is for two primary reasons: first of all is that you reach a point in the game (quite early on) where there’s nothing to do but wait around, which is part of the mechanics, secondly is that the gameplay doesn’t really change all that much apart from unlocking the odd new feature here and there. Essentially the experience stays the same throughout, you just get to buy, plant and harvest rarer crops.

The concept itself is pretty straightforward, we started with our own land and were guided by the tutorial on how to build plots to grow in, once built we could choose from a handful of different crop seeds that we wanted to plant and then we had to tend to the crop. When we plant a crop it told us how long it would take until that crop was ready to harvest, around 10 minutes for the basic crops, but by watering a crop using your water resource, feeding it with fertilizer and potentially boosting it further with crop dusting and super fertilizer, we could drop this wait down considerably with each individual buff. Once grown we could simply click the item and it would add it to our own stores, clearing the field to be used again, for us to then use the crop in one of three primary ways: sell it to players, fulfil contracts (quests) or use it in production.

Similarly alongside crops we could construct a variety of animal enclosures and breed animals, initially starting with a chicken coop we could, as you would expect, breed chickens. In a similar fashion we had to water the animals, but also feed them. Chicken feed could be bought or we could create it ourselves in the production area from some of crops we had harvested. Again it took a set amount of time to yield some new chickens, but when we were done we could collect the chickens and add them to our store and then clean out the pen, which gave us fertilizer to help grow our crops, which could be used to feed the animals, and thus the symbiotic nature cycle of the farm! Beautiful huh?

Clearing out crops and pens not only gave us resources, but also gave us XP that would level us up, in doing so we got access to new seeds and animal pens from the farmers market to further improve our farm, which would yield new crops, giving us more XP, to buy new seeds and animal pens from the farmers market to further improve our farm, which would…. You get it. It is a fairly endless cycle that really works for an addictive and simple formula that makes these games so successful, they are easy and casual and keep players constantly invested.

The casual nature very much determined the pace of the game, we spent a lot of time waiting for crops to grow or to breed animals, even with our buff resources it didn’t always pull the harvest/breeding time down significantly so it is very difficult to just constantly keep playing the game at such an early level. Again, once you get further into the game, having committed a lot of time to it already, you have on your hands a lot more stuff that requires even more time and investment. What’s it all for at the end of the day? There’s no “end game”, no victory, it’s just enjoying running your own little farm, maybe making some cool items or rare crops and animals and selling them to the community to say “hey look what I made”. That is one of the great things about the game, from when you start out you are introduced to the “Chickadee” program, a mentor program for new players to be voluntarily hooked up with veterans who can teach them the ropes. Players are encouraged to add friends to their Farm as they get more bonuses and can help each other out; it is a game that promotes social networking and cooperation as opposed to competition (albeit there’s an element of having the best farm that comes with the game).

Whilst Farmerama is in no way our kind of game, we definitely see the ease of gameplay and pride that can go into running your own farm and the accomplishment that can be gained from it, playing casually and checking in a few times a day is more than enough to get your little rural paradise thriving. A good game for all ages, providing farm simulators are your kind of thing!

SCORE

• Graphics: 7


• Performance: 10


• Gameplay: 7

• Pros: Interesting symbiosis between crops and animals, positive cooperative gameplay, fun casual game.


• Cons: Very linear in progression, the same gameplay and style of content throughout.

Final Score: 8

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2015 at 5:43 pm and is filed under Articles, MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Puedes dejar una respuesta, o un trackback desde tu sitio web.