Players looking for a little more difficulty can switch to timed mode, which introduces the possibility of failure (though its unlikely, thanks to those powerful bonus items) while offering a cash reward for swifter success. There’s nothing particularly innovative or even challenging here-your primary concern isn’t finding matches but rather choosing which match you want to make to try to get to those hard-to-reach gold tiles lurking in tendrils that shoot away from the body of the grid-but it’s fun. Luckily, powerful bonus items such as firecrackers, bombs, and hives make things easier by, say, blowing up all nearby tiles or sending swarms of bees to remove specific objects. Wooden tiles that obscure objects need to be broken by creating matches beside them while ice tiles can only be removed by making a match with objects inside them. Obstacles and bonus items are slowly introduced as the game progresses. The main goal is usually to clear the screen of all gold tiles by matching objects above them, but sometimes we’re given a different objective, such as clearing a number of objects of a certain kind to match a customer’s order (it’s essentially a business these puzzles are how we make money to finance the farm’s renovations). The objects disappear once matched, often causing a cascade of additional matches as new objects fall from the top of the grid. Players simply click on two adjacent objects to have them swap places as they try to create a vertical or horizontal string of three. Simple but engaging, these puzzles take place on tiled boards of various shapes and sizes that are filled with farm-themed objects, such as eggplants, jars of honey, and eggs. With our help, he cleans up the fields, renovates buildings, plants some crops, decorates the land, and eventually begins to diversify production by adding elements such as a hen house and bee hives.īut outfitting the farm-a basic but gratifying design exercise-might best be considered a reward for working through the heart of the game: Classic match-three puzzling. Once at the farm-a beautiful 3-D environment filled with highly detailed object and character models, lots of interactive elements to click on just for fun, and soothing background music laden with lazy guitars, gentle brass, and delicate, meandering strings-the boy discovers that he has a previously unknown interest in and knack for running a farm.
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The irony of it all is that once you pick up this devilishly habit-forming match-three puzzler, you’re likely to do just that: Spend plenty of prime tobogganing time in front of your computer. Farmscapes is a well-crafted treat for puzzle and hidden object gamers.įarmscapes, the latest effort from Russian game maker Playrix ( Gardenscapes, Royal Envoy), tells the story of a teenaged kid who is sent to his grandfather’s farm to make sure he doesn’t waste his summer vacation inside playing video games.