Farm Story Review

Let’s be honest with each other. Looking at the name, we both know what I’m going to say. If you’d like more detail, then read on, but you’ll probably be content with this:

Yup, it sucks.

Farm Story is, for all intents and purposes, a shameless copy of FarmVille. You plow the land, plant crops, wait a set amount of time, harvest the crops, and repeat the cycle. It’s busywork, but it’s rewarding – every action earns you coins, to use towards more crops or buildings or animals.

Farm Story controls just as you’d expect, scrolling and zooming are natural, and the placement and harvesting of crops is simple. Navigating menus is just as easy, and every plant is distinguishable.
Like other social games, the app thrives on you telling your two friends who tell their two friends and so on and so forth. Farm Story will also send you to visit random other farms and water their crops for bonus experience. The game allows you to connect to your Facebook Farm Story, thus allowing you to invite friends, visit their farms, etc. I would’ve tested the Facebook connectivity, but none of my Facebook friends play Farm Story.

That’s right. I could not test it because not one of my 313 friends plays Farm Story.

Maybe my friends and I would be more inclined to play if Farm Story offered up something new. It’s a shame the game does absolutely NOTHING to differentiate itself from other farm games. The art, the music, everything…it’s all the same as FarmVille, minus the polish the Zynga game has. Maybe I was being too hopeful in thinking that the game would offer up a new mechanic; that it would do something different than its source material.

Farm Story offers a solid farming game, but lacks any innovation to build up the audience it needs. If you come into this expecting anything different than a FarmVille knock-off like I did, then you’ll be sorely disappointed.