FarmVille Review

So let’s get the first thing that you’re all wondering of off your minds, why am I reviewing FarmVille? Well we here at Scottisalwaysright.com do not discriminate between games. We may not be able to review every single game out there but if one is regularly played by many people then one of us will definatly be looking into it to see what all the fuss is about! FarmVille is one of these games, it has over 60 million active users across the world, that’s more users than there are Modern Warfare 2 players! So is FarmVille a good game? Well no, it’s terrible and this article will tell you why it’s so bad, yet still so incredibly popular…

So for you, my readers, I endured a pain so brutal that I nearly lost my sanity, I played FarmVille for a week straight, so you don’t have to even try it out of curiosity. Yes, I diligently tended to my virtual crops and virtual animals every day for a week straight, making thousands of ‘coins’ and attentively fertilizing my neighbour’s crops like a good virtual farmer. Every day, I did the exact same thing, over and over again. As you can imagine I quickly got bored of the whole charade and by the end of day one I knew it was going to be a tough week. However, a strange mood started to beset me during the time that I was not playing FarmVille, I kept on looking at the clock and thinking things along the lines of:

“Only about 3 more hours until I have to harvest my crops on FarmVille.”

Notice how I said “have to” in that sentence,  because if you fail to harvest your crops quickly they start to wither, making them useless, meaning all of that money you spent planting said crops will have been wasted. There is however, a more disturbing aspect to that “have to”, which for me, started to sound alarm bells in my head. My days of Travian had come back to haunt me.

What is Travian? Travian is a browser game, like FarmVille and like most browser games works on the same basic principles to get you hooked and subsequently get you to pay them money. Here’s how they do it:

The first thing these games do is teach you how to play the game by giving you simple tasks/missions to do. Once you have completed these they reward you, which leads you to automatically do the exact same thing, I mean you would be stupid not to! This makes you somewhat invested in the game, it is at this stage that they introduce a danger to your investment, by making your crops wither or create an environment where other players will try to steal your resources (Travian). You will naturally want to protect your investment, so you will go back to that game. When you go back, you will inevitably do more of the tasks that they initially taught you to do, increasing your overall investment in the game, making you even more likely to go back again! The next thing they do is give you the opportunity to expand and if you keep on expanding, this makes your time spent on the game doing all of those tasks dramatically increase. This is the point where they make their money, most people don’t want to spend ages managing their account but at the same time want to protect their investment. So the game company offers the player a way to manage their account much faster but at a price. Some players may not pay for this service but a lot do and some game companies go even further and offer real money items/services which will give you an distinct edge over other players.

Now I fell into this trap when I was younger, thankfully though, I broke free of my ‘investment’ but when I started to play FarmVille for this review, I noticed how they were implementing the exact same strategy, just in a slightly different form.

Now that was just a basic look on how these games get you pay them money and trust me, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I have even heard rumours of games like these hiring psychologists to make their game much more addicting.

Anyway, FarmVille gives you a wide selection of crops to plant and harvest. The only real differences between these crops is that they cost differing amounts of coins, sell for differing amounts of coins and have different growth times. You can plant crops that take anywhere from two hours to two days to fully grow and of course, you can plant different combinations of crops on your field. The ‘crop cycle’ is composed of three really simple tasks, you have to initially plough the crop patch, then plant some seeds in it and finally harvest the patch when the crops have fully grown. All three tasks do not take up much time initially but when you start to manage large fields they begin to really drag on. However, when you reach a high enough level you can start to buy, tractors, seeders and harvesters to speed things up, which can be bought with coins. However, they need fuel to run and this will cost you real life cash (see what they did there?). An even more ridiculous aspect to all of this, is the fact that they offer you ‘hot rod’ vehicles, which do the exact same job as the normal equivalent vehicles but have a different paint style and will actually cost you real life money!

Now if any of your friends on facebook have also fallen into the FarmVille trap, you can add them as neighbours, visit their farm and fertilise their crops (speeds up harvest time and rewards more XP). By adding enough neighbours, you can expand your farm to greater sizes, giving you room to plant even more crops and end up wasting much more of your time!

Perhaps the most annoying feature to the game though is the way they try to use your facebook account as some sort of advertising spam bot. Throughout the game, whenever you do something major, like level up or something random like plant your 40^th crop a pop up box will appear, saying something like: Tell your friends about the mundane and boring task you have just done! Which once accepted, will blast your facebook wall with a box telling your friends just that and if they are silly enough to click on the box then they will be taken to the world of FarmVille to endure the same things that you are!

That’s basically all there is to FarmVille, you can also buy some animals and buildings, to make even more coins and make your farm look pretty but there is nothing else to it. The game is just about you planting and harvesting your crops  throughout the day, to make virtual money which you will use to plant even more crops, which will eventually become too much hassle to manage, so you will buy vehicles to speed things up that require real life money to run. Although you can randomly find fuel in your crops (how did that get there again?) you will still burn through the stuff faster than you can find it, meaning to keep your farm running as efficiently as possible you will have to spend actual money on what has to be one of the least challenging and boring games I have ever played in my life. The only real challenge in that game has to be planning your life around your crops to make sure they do not wither. The only reason it has been successful, like most browser games, seems to be the fact that it gets you to make ever increasing investments into the game which in turn keeps you playing.

Game play 0.5/5:  Plough your field, plant your crops, wait, harvest, rinse and repeat. This game offers absolutely no challenge to the player.

Story 0/5: No story. No score.

Graphics 3/5:  It is a browser game, so I will let it off on this one, there are better graphics out there for browser games but FarmVille does an admirable job with what it has.

Sound 1/5:  You can hear the moos and the clucks of the animals but the music nearly drove me insane, eventually I had to turned it off.

OVERALL 1.1/5: This game only works to try and get you hooked to it, it only tries to make you come back to it so you can do the same old repetitive and dull tasks and it offers no real challenge to the player. You would do well to never play or go near this game!

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