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 (opens in new tab)]
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)
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Former app and photography editor at iMore, Leanna has since moved on to other endeavors. Mother, wife, mathamagician, even though she no longer writes for iMore you can still follow her on Twitter @llofte.
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Meh.....
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This bigger problem is that this game, er, um, activity, gets boring very fast. Why can't there be actual game play in a Facebook farming game?
"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." Indeed. And that's putting it kindly.
My biggest problem with We Farm is that it has the Crops Wither rule/effect - the worst game design effect of present-day game design. This having your crops die if you don't harvest in-time is just the dumbest thing ever. Basically, you're telling your customer that his or her time isn't valuable and so no Auto-Harvest for you. Seriously...does anyone LIKE this effect? Does this effect make a BETTER game? Or was it in Farmville so it's just GOTTA be there? -
How come you don't play we rule no more LL?
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The graphics and game play of this one are so much better than farmville that I stopped playing that one. You didn't mention that there's little NPC characters that walk around and perform build tasks or you can touch and they make noises like a pillsbury doughboy. It's silly and funny. Much more engaging game than all the other farm apps.
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Not mentioning Farmville in this review is disingeneous at best.
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I don't know why people complain about the animal petting/happiness aspect. It would be a problem if you HAD to get your animals a blue ribbon at the fair in order to enjoy the game or do well at the game, but that's NOT the case, not even close. You still get TONS of generous experience points even if your animal ends up being only 5% "happy". And, if/when your animal does get a blue ribbon, you never have to keep it happy again. So the frequent attention part of it is only a one-time thing. And you don't ever have to give the frequent attention at all in the game if you don't want to or don't have time to. It's not a requirement in any way.
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This info was perfect: "If you’re familiar with We Rule, We Farm is very similar".
Now I know: This game will BORE YOU TO TEARS. I've fallen asleep watching SCREEN SAVERS and had more excitement than this.
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Everyine should knwo that this game uses cheating to get real money from your iTunes account. The Gro store charges your credic card without even telling you that. It's really not a free game but a scam - be aware!
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