New Software To Be Reviewed Review

Dream Farm: Home Town is yet another wonderful game from Alawar Games (which in my book, so far) has produced some of the great "small industry" games such as "Royal Envoy".

But instead of rebuilding islands, "Dream Farm" is - you guessed it - a game where you try to build a farm.

You're kinda thrown right into it. The game makers do give you some preliminary instructions, but it can be incredibly confusing at first. You own a small plot of grassy land to begin with. With your watering can, mower, and spade you are allowed to create as large or small a farm as your heart desires, and your goal (as always) is to cultivate crops.

There are two things you can do with crops: sell them at the market in your own personal shop, or use them to create more advanced products (which in turn can be sold). How? Along the bottom are three tabs. The farm tab is in the middle, the market tab is to the left, and the (for lack of a better description) livestock and factory tab is the rightmost one.

In the L&F tab (as I shall call it), you can buy plots of land where you can build buildings that allow you to turn crops into something more useful. For instance, with a stable, you can turn grass into milk thanks to the cows that are kept there. All you have to do is continually feed your livestock and machines your crops to keep them producing.

In the market tab, of course, you can sell your wares.

Now, just so we're clear, this is not some dime-a-dozen, text-only, browser MMOG. The makers of this game put plenty of work into it to make it enjoyable. So you won't be looking at large, boring blocks of text all the time, and it'll seem far more interesting than I make it out to be.

But the market is the place where the real multiplayer interaction occurs.

Aside from selling your own wares, you can buy other peoples' wares. Why would you? Let's say you are cultivating nothing but sugar beets, but also want to produce milk. You can buy grass from other players.

You can also sell large amounts of things to certain buyers if you move quickly. These buyers provide a special kind of income called "stars", which allow you to do everything from buying new seeds to expanding your farm. So it is of utmost importance to provide your goods before someone else does...

As I said, they kinda throw you into the gameplay to begin with; the "tutorial" is somewhat informative, but most of the things you learn are through experience and trial and error. I picked it up within the first ten minutes.

The graphics are great; the animators went to some length to make them look cartoony and distinct. You can usually see quite a few different fellows wandering about the market, and a few standing in the centre of it looking for sellers of large amounts of products. The buildings, crops, and tools are well detailed. They even animated the factories and livestock pens to "bounce" about like "Beauty and the Beast" tablewares. It's kinda ridiculous. :3

The sounds are decent; there are many of them for the farm, but not really for anywhere else. Most of the time you'll hear the mower harvesting crops (if you play the game right), but you'll also hear alerts. None of them are annoying. They fit with the game.

The music's something of a cross between hicky, farm-like music and something a little more modern, so it's not so distinct that it gets annoying, but it's kind of enjoyable, too.

Now, as I said before, it IS a multiplayer game. You have to register a username, e-mail address, and password before you can play. They do give you a 72 hour trial to experiement with the game and play around with it. This is a very strong feature of it, as you'll really get into the game. But, as is with these demos, the trial will expire, and you will eventually have to pay $6.99 a month to continue playing it.

If you do somehow manage to find the economy addicting enough, or anyone to socialise and collaborate with in your sales, it might just be worth that, too.