We Farm for iPad ? app review

We Farm for iPad is a real-time farming game by ngmoco. If you?re familiar with We Rule, We Farm is very similar except that your are building a farm instead of kingdom.

As with most ngmoco games, you must have a plus+ account to play. If you don?t have one already, signing up is simple. When you first start playing We Farm, the game takes you through a little tutorial which is pretty helpful.

The goal of We Farm is to raise money and build your farm. You raise money by growing crops, raising animals, and receiving and placing orders with friends. Almost everything you do yields experience points. As you level, more items are available for purchase; higher level buildings will output more money. You will also be able to upgrade your farm as you level which gives you more space and gives you a nicer looking farmhouse. You can also turn on notifications to alert you when certain tasks are complete. However, they do not work for me. I?ve asked around and apparently I?m the only with this problem.

There are two currencies used in We Farm. The first is gold and is what you make doing various farm tasks and buying items. The other is Gro. This is used to instantly complete tasks like growing crops, building buildings, fulfilling an order, raising animals, and increasing your animals? happiness. You earn Gro every time you level and is also available as an in-app purchase.

My biggest complaint of We Farm is animal raising. To make your animal happy, you have to periodically ?pet? it. Each pet increases the animal?s happiness by 5%. The happier your animal is, the better chance he has of winning a prize at the fair. Once you win a prize, your pen/coop/pasture becomes available for your friends to place orders at. This means you make a lot more money from it. The problem is that if you have an animal that takes 2 hours to raise, you must come back every 6 minutes during that 2 hour period to get the happiness to 100%. This is an unrealistic expectation in my eyes. Of course, you can get around this by using Gro, but We Farm doesn?t provide enough Gro to use it on all animals before needing to spend real money. However, the happier your animal is, the less Gro it takes to bring him to 100% happiness, so my strategy is to pet my animals as much as I can, then use grow at the end to bring it to 100%.

Another small complaint I have is that there isn?t a way to quickly return to your own farm when visiting someone else?s farm. I?d like to a small icon to tap in the corner of all farms that quickly takes to your farm.

All in all, I enjoy playing We Farm. However, you must like time management games to have fun with this one. I have been impressed with the performance of the app; it runs smoothly, I?ve never received a memory error (a common problem with We Rule), nor has it ever crashed. So if you?re a fan of these types of games, check out We Farm ? it?s free!

Screenshots after the break!

[Free - iTunes link]



Pros

Good performance
Fun
Easy to tailor around how much you want to play
Cons

Can?t quickly return to your farm when visiting someone else?s farm.
Animal petting requirement for a ribbon is unreasonable
Push notifications not working (for me)







SYNTEL TERADATA TEXAS INSTRUMENTS