Game review: Farm Frenzy - iPhone / iPod Touch

As you would expect from the title this game, which is fun for kids and adults alike, takes place on a farm.

It features 45 challenging levels to complete, five types of animals to nurture from ducks to cows, nine products to sell and six buildings to buy and upgrade.

The levels range in complexity, from simply collecting a certain number of crops to completing multiple objectives such as raising a specific sum of cash, owning a set number of animals and making a required amount of products.

During each level you raise cash by sending crops and products to market. To be successful, you need to look after your animals and invest money wisely in additions to your farm such as new equipment.

The farm is run using simple touch controls. Touch the farmyard to put down grass to feed your animals. Touch the well to replenish your water supplies. Touch invading bears (yes, bears) to cage them and step them meddling with your livestock (you can even sell bears at market too!). The controls are very easy, and work well.

Each level is timed and there are deadlines to hit if you want to achieve gold or silver awards. The gold and silver awards act as bonuses, which increase how much money can be invested in new items for your farm and upgrades to structures between levels.

Each level can be replayed in your quest to achieve gold on them all, though you can move on to a new level without having to gain a medal on the previous one. In some cases it is beneficial or even necessary to replay a level before moving on, regardless of how you did. This is because some levels require you to own certain items before starting them, and if you don’t have enough cash to buy these items then you’re stuck.

While some levels are relatively easy to complete, others offer an incredibly intense challenge. The difficulty of the game noticeably increases after the first few levels but it never gets overwhelming or frustrating.

You often find yourself trying to juggle several tasks at once, and if you drop the ball on one task it can have a knock-on effect on the others. Staying calm when things get busy is key to success, as is finding the right strategy to get through each level.

Planning and timing play major parts in the game. You need to think one or two moves ahead, managing your resources effectively. For instance, you can only send a certain quantity of stock to be sold in one go. While your truck is away from the farm, new items must be stored until it returns for the next load. But your storeroom can soon overspill, and if you don’t transfer excess crops from the farmyard to the storeroom in time they go to waste. So you need to choose when is best to send your truck to market and what items to include on each run.

There are some quite complex processes to keep track of in the game. For example, eggs become egg solids which then become baked goods. To achieve this you need water to grow the grass which feeds the ducks which lay the eggs. But the process collapses if you don’t have enough money to buy many ducks, an egg processing plant or a bakery. Most things in the game follow this kind of chain flow.

Farm Frenzy actually offers a surprisingly deep experience, though as you can hopefully tell it isn’t designed to be a realistic business sim in any way. It’s just a fun game where you try to make money down on the farm.

The game doesn’t take itself too seriously, illustrated by its cute cartoony graphics.

Farm Frenzy is very entertaining and also quite addictive.

There are lots of games out there that let you run a business of some sort on a casual level, be it a chocolate shop, a diner, fruit juice stand or in this case a farm. Most of them offer similar gameplay, just in different settings.

Farm Frenzy doesn’t bring anything wildly original to the time management table, but it is a very polished and worthy addition to the genre.

Verdict: 8 out of 10 – Harvests all the raw materials of the standard time management format and turns them into a cute, fast-paced and fun game