Look, okay, I know it sounds bad on paper. Also, it's kinda bad in practice for an hour or so. Yeah, I know there's not a lot to chew on here, that it's just 3D Farmville without the microtransactions, that on some consoles it runs like hot garbage.
Sometimes you just need a stress ball, alright? For me, I gotta feel like there's some kind of long-term planning, so I can't just fire up an aim trainer or Minesweeper or [third example].
This game is very carefully tailored to the person who wants to:
1. Create a personalized cartoon farm for its own sake.
2. Repeatedly return to the game at their own pace and have their dedication rewarded with constant progress.
3. Play a stress-free hangout game with their friends without needing to schedule a game night. No advanced mechanics, no fail states.
Because this game is married to real-life timers, the early game suffers badly. You've picked up a new game and this is likely to be the peak of your interest in it, only to find that you can't do very much because you're short on money and the crops you can plant right now don't make very much. If the aforementioned design goals don't sound like you, you're probably going to bounce off this thing right here. Sorry! There's no catch, it's not a "secret masterpiece" that asks you to push past the tedium. What you see at hour 2 is what you get at hour 200, just on a smaller scale.
Mechanics:
What I've learned to admire about it in the past week of playing with a newbie is the way each element of the game contributes to an ever-shifting economy. There are five main sources of income - Fields, Trees, Animals, Flowers, and Fish. Each income source strikes its own balance between required effort, payout, and frequency, and since each crop has its own level, crops can scale differently as you go - something that has excellent gold per minute at the start may be quickly outpaced if you show a little dedication to a lesser crop. There is no wrong choice - you will always be rewarded, but efficiency freaks will always have something to consider.
The other reason why this works is that different functions use different currencies. I know we're all exhausted by hearing "currencies" in the plural, but this actually serves a gameplay function. Gold is used for crops, diamonds are used for cosmetics, medals are used for major convenience upgrades, and tickets are used for automation. The mention of "crop levels" might have caused some to wince, but it allows for this evolving sense of progression where animals seem like a huge money pit for a new player, but their products convert nicely into tickets that make larger farms easier to run. Second example: Trees fall off very quickly as gold generators, but late-game trees start yielding rarer resources like spices instead, keeping you from bulldozing your orchard.
Quests ensure that you'll always have several plates spinning to meet their diverse needs, but since there are no time limits and no fail states, you can straight up ignore all of this and just let your kid walk around in splitscreen planting whatever they like, ignore the thing for ten minutes/a day/three weeks and come back to show them the fruits of their labor.
What I will say regarding the economy is that some crops do become functionally useless as time goes on - the game rewards you so much for unlocking new crops that the oldest ones cannot possibly scale enough to compensate. Everything gets better with dedication, but once you've made enough progress to unlock 2000-profit-per-seed chard, you probably don't care about the 15 profit lettuce, and your farm is likely too large to benefit from its fast grow time since you've got other stuff to do.
Conclusion:
It's not a lot, but there's value in it. It's good for kids, it's good for chilling in a Discord call and chatting, it's good for when you're slightly too high and staring at your Steam library like you're sorting a to-do list. I know it shares an aesthetic with 500 different App Store games called some shit like "Harvest Heroes" but you gotta trust me on this one! It's me, your Backloggd friend! Let's hop on a voice call together and plant leeks for six hours straight!Please help me harvest leeks
Sometimes you just need a stress ball, alright? For me, I gotta feel like there's some kind of long-term planning, so I can't just fire up an aim trainer or Minesweeper or [third example].
This game is very carefully tailored to the person who wants to:
1. Create a personalized cartoon farm for its own sake.
2. Repeatedly return to the game at their own pace and have their dedication rewarded with constant progress.
3. Play a stress-free hangout game with their friends without needing to schedule a game night. No advanced mechanics, no fail states.
Because this game is married to real-life timers, the early game suffers badly. You've picked up a new game and this is likely to be the peak of your interest in it, only to find that you can't do very much because you're short on money and the crops you can plant right now don't make very much. If the aforementioned design goals don't sound like you, you're probably going to bounce off this thing right here. Sorry! There's no catch, it's not a "secret masterpiece" that asks you to push past the tedium. What you see at hour 2 is what you get at hour 200, just on a smaller scale.
Mechanics:
What I've learned to admire about it in the past week of playing with a newbie is the way each element of the game contributes to an ever-shifting economy. There are five main sources of income - Fields, Trees, Animals, Flowers, and Fish. Each income source strikes its own balance between required effort, payout, and frequency, and since each crop has its own level, crops can scale differently as you go - something that has excellent gold per minute at the start may be quickly outpaced if you show a little dedication to a lesser crop. There is no wrong choice - you will always be rewarded, but efficiency freaks will always have something to consider.
The other reason why this works is that different functions use different currencies. I know we're all exhausted by hearing "currencies" in the plural, but this actually serves a gameplay function. Gold is used for crops, diamonds are used for cosmetics, medals are used for major convenience upgrades, and tickets are used for automation. The mention of "crop levels" might have caused some to wince, but it allows for this evolving sense of progression where animals seem like a huge money pit for a new player, but their products convert nicely into tickets that make larger farms easier to run. Second example: Trees fall off very quickly as gold generators, but late-game trees start yielding rarer resources like spices instead, keeping you from bulldozing your orchard.
Quests ensure that you'll always have several plates spinning to meet their diverse needs, but since there are no time limits and no fail states, you can straight up ignore all of this and just let your kid walk around in splitscreen planting whatever they like, ignore the thing for ten minutes/a day/three weeks and come back to show them the fruits of their labor.
What I will say regarding the economy is that some crops do become functionally useless as time goes on - the game rewards you so much for unlocking new crops that the oldest ones cannot possibly scale enough to compensate. Everything gets better with dedication, but once you've made enough progress to unlock 2000-profit-per-seed chard, you probably don't care about the 15 profit lettuce, and your farm is likely too large to benefit from its fast grow time since you've got other stuff to do.
Conclusion:
It's not a lot, but there's value in it. It's good for kids, it's good for chilling in a Discord call and chatting, it's good for when you're slightly too high and staring at your Steam library like you're sorting a to-do list. I know it shares an aesthetic with 500 different App Store games called some shit like "Harvest Heroes" but you gotta trust me on this one! It's me, your Backloggd friend! Let's hop on a voice call together and plant leeks for six hours straight!
jobosno
11 months ago