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Farm Frenzy 3 from Alawar Games is a simulation game where you have to start by helping your African friend rebuild his devastated farm. The idea is simple but novel. You are given a number of fowls first, which will lay eggs after you have pumped enough water to grow grass as their fodder. You can then collect and sell the eggs, or send them to an eggpowder plant. Whatever is manufactured can again be sold, or be used to make other things. In the process, you gain some profit.

There are enemies lurking though! Every once in a while, a lion or two (or bears) will drop out of nowhere on your farmland, and start smacking your guinea birds (geese in another scene) around. You gotta click fast to build a cage around them. They can also be sold at a good price! You have a cute scooter to carry your goods to the market. A helicopter, on the other hand, supplies orders that you need, but don't produce.

Birds aren't the only animals. You can have yaks producing fleece, cows giving milk, ostriches shedding feathers, and even dogs and cats, who will fetch the items. Wacky!

The warehouse holds a limited number of items. The plants also manufacture at a given input/output ratio. But these can be upgraded using the 'star' points you achieve by playing each level. Almost everything can be upgraded! Some examples are incubator, eggpowder plant, cookie factory, cake factory, spinnery, etc.

For some reason, your earnings don't accumulate as you progress through the levels! That was annoying. In each level, you have to reach a preset goal within a given time, like reaching a target income, or a target production.

There is enough variety of animals, buildings, and backgrounds scenes. But the basic gameplay remains the same. True that things can get interesting when you get too much collecting to do all the while trying to earn the gold medal, but the tasks really get repetitive! After playing through 30 levels, I thought whether there's anything else to do. Calling it 'boring' won't do justice, but it becomes so at points. Also the farming space can get very crowded, so you have to sell off extra animals.

The game gives you hints whenever you start with a new animal or structure. But I was stuck at a point for some time. I had built a spinnery, and didn't know how to get wool. The symbol on the spinnery showed white wool. After a while, I found something brown shows up when I hover the mouse pointer over the yak's button, and that's what I needed!

This game is a RAM-eater! At one point, it was sitting on over half a gigabyte, and slowed down the computer considerably!

The animation, graphics and music are good. There's a storyline, but not really worth following. There may be some replay value. You may want to go back to previously completed levels to try and finish them in record time to achieve awards. You gotta be a queuing management expert to earn all of them!

I recommend playing the 30-minute free trial version, which is available from Alawar Games' website, before you make the decision to invest $9.95.