theSchap's Blog

Who: Devel­oped by Vince McDon­nell, and Pub­lished by the Play­forge (the forg­ers of playtime?)

What: Farm­ing simulation

Where: Fan­tasy Zom­bie World

When: Avail­able now in the app store for *“Free”…
* item may not be that free

Why: Because every­one can find a strange monot­o­nous addic­tion to vir­tual farming.

Plow­ing on the farm.

I’ve talked about the whole “free to play” model before and have seen it as mostly a good thing. This game seems to abuse that model slightly. A good “free to play” game will allow you to play indef­i­nitely, but have sparkles, frost­ing, shiny things, and time sav­ing bonuses behind cash walls. This allows every­one, casual and invested, to play on the same field while the invested play­ers can stand out with their elite visual splen­dor and lower time invest­ment. What I don’t like is when a game is com­pletely blocked by a cash wall hid­den in the game. If they were going to be hon­est they would have made this game a “Lite” ver­sion, allow­ing you to play up until level 10, and then let­ting you mess around all you want up to that point. Instead you get what seems to be a full game, that punches you in the face and shakes you down for money after level 10.

Zom­bie Farm plays much like it’s insanely suc­cess­ful big broth­ers Farm Town, Far­mville, Aquar­ium Love, Mon­key Tacos, and many oth­ers that plague Face­book news. Where is the Block All Appli­ca­tions but­ton? The biggest dif­fer­ence, and sell­ing point for any­one who has vowed to avoid the Face­book sib­lings are the zom­bies. Zom­bies are cool and zom­bies have been con­cept gold for a decade or so and I pre­dict they will be for some time to come. Zom­bies are a great way of let­ting peo­ple destroy humans with­out feel­ing any kind of humane remorse, because well, they are already dead. Zom­bie Farm’s undead can be used to attack neigh­bor­ing farms. This mode plays  like a cas­tle defense game, but you are on the attack­ing end. You must kill all the farmhands and even­tu­ally the farm mas­ter. While you fight the farmhands the farm mas­ter is chuck­ing all kinds of stuff at your attack­ing force. The game mechanic is fun enough, but the major pay­off is the chance of get­ting a brain, which allows you to unlock some of the higher level items. Brains are hard to come buy unless you want to drop real money on them.

The game is packed with plants like toma­toes, pota­toes, and venus fly­traps. Like the Face­book pre­de­ces­sors, each crop has it’s own grow time, which keeps you com­ing back to har­vest, make some coin, and then replant or upgrade to some­thing that yields more coin. The zom­bies work in much the same way. There are five main types of zom­bies: bal­anced, tough, nim­ble, fast, strong, and  the fer­til­iz­ers. Each has its own advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages when attack­ing farms. The fer­til­iz­ers will run around your farm improv­ing yields on all crops; plant and zombie.

There is an added level of depth present in this game that makes it a bit more than just a copy of other pop­u­lar farm games. Plac­ing spe­cific crops around your zom­bie crops adds spe­cial bonuses to their stats like attack, speed, and defense. This requires you to do a bit of plan­ning when plant­ing because the zom­bies must be har­vested before the crop to get the desired effect.

Quan­ti­ta­tive Review:

• Game­play: 7.6 - Noth­ing new to the genre besides the small addi­tion of strate­gic depth. The game still gets very repet­i­tive and click heavy for no appar­ent rea­son but to take time. These games could eas­ily let you select large regions instead of indi­vid­ual squares. Maybe I’m just not meant to be a farmer. Unlock­ing new zom­bies is fun but it comes at a price. Going beyond green zom­bies will require you to buy a BLUE grave­stone, which unlocks the BLUE zom­bies. These are required for the bat­tles after lvl 10 where the farmhands are armed with mus­cles and axes. Bat­tles after level 10 are impos­si­ble to win, requir­ing you to spend $0.99 for the blue gravestone.  The game suf­fers greatly from click inac­cu­racy, which is an issue on iPhone games in gen­eral and the farm­ing games on Face­book. When these issues com­bine it gets pretty painful. This cou­pled with per­for­mance issues when zoomed in on a lot of crops makes the game unplayable some­times. Sadly this is becom­ing com­mon with games on the infe­rior 3G proces­sor. Thanks for seg­re­gat­ing the mar­ket Apple.

Invad­ing with a Cyborg Tomato zombie!

• Visu­als: 8.1 - Gen­eral crops and play­ers look a lot like those present in Face­book farm­ing games. Some of the more unique crops and zom­bies are pretty cool look­ing. Cyborg zom­bies are pretty bad ass.
• Sound: 8.3 - The music is very “farm-like” and thrown veg­eta­bles make a comic squish­ing sound. Hun­gry, bat­tle crav­ing zom­bies walk around say­ing “Brains” in a humor­ous voice that filled me with glee.
• Pre­sen­ta­tion: 6.8 - The pre­sen­ta­tion of this game seemed to irri­tate me from the begin­ning. Every sin­gle time you start the game it asks you if you would like to con­nect to Face­book. My account is already plagued with unstop­pable, spam-like updates on point­less shit that other peo­ple have clicked on that I refused to ever allow the game to inter­face with Face­book in any way. Ask­ing me once, every 5th time, or hav­ing an option in the set­tings would be wel­comed, but being asked EVERY TIME was very irri­tat­ing. Once the game loads up you get harassed by sev­eral other pop ups telling you to spend money on brains, give you a minus­cule coin prize, and tell you AGAIN that con­nect­ing to Face­book could give you bet­ter prizes. Once you fin­ish a bat­tle, and I believe after you reach cer­tain lev­els it makes sure to remind you to spend some real money to get bet­ter zom­bies, and buy some brains. All this does is help cre­ate some kind of pathetic money machine that I just don’t want to be a part of. There are too many less mun­dane ways to have fun for free.

You will see this a lot unless you spend some real money.

• Zom­bieism: 8.4 - Zom­bie Farm rep­re­sents it’s name pretty well. I was happy with the game’s visual depic­tion and vari­a­tion in zom­bies. The “Zom­Bump­kin” was a bit con­fus­ing at first, because it’s crazy under-bite almost looked like a third arm or erupted chest burster. Dur­ing bat­tles your zom­bie army will get dis­tracted by thoughts of rain­bows, candy, and but­ter­flies. That’s pretty amusing.

• Over­all: 7.8 - I appre­ci­ate the zom­bie take on the whole farm­ing genre, but the drive for money could have been masked a bit bet­ter. Zom­bie Farm seemed a bit too much like a pros­ti­tute that was lack­ing in it’s own abil­ity, so it decided to jump on the mas­sive zom­bie band­wagon. I’m not sure what a cheap zom­bie pros­ti­tute looks like, but I know I’ve spent enough time with one. I gave it $0.99 and in return got some more fod­der for this review and that seems good enough for me. Although if you aren’t one of the tens of mil­lions that have been sucked unknow­ingly into a farm­ing game on Face­book you could find some enjoy­ment in this zom­bie fla­vored rendition.