If you couldn’t get enough of the Diner Dash franchise, here is yet another version of the game, with a story revolving around a urban family having to learn the ins and outs of farming by taking over the operations of Uncle Bill’s farm. It starts out fairly simple: feed and water chickens, goats, and cows, and reap the benefits of their care with their eggs and milk which you sell to a favorite local restaurant, owned by Flo, of course. Most of the game revolves around your ability to point, click, and then point and click again on some target, all the while watching your character run around frantically completing your assigned tasks.
Your animals (or vegetation) are the “customers” in this game, with a heart meter that seemed a bit hard to see for me. Plus I don’t think I ever had a difficult time maintaining their heart meter to full or almost full throughout the game. Maybe it was me not wanting to hear the desperate sounds of clucking and mooing.
This seems totally unrelated to the game, but the one thing that surprised me was the quality of the music. It almost sounded like a symphony was playing a knock-off of an Aaron Copeland overture for the main theme, though every now and then it would degenerate into some banjo plucking away with a daintier tune. I suppose it seemed to feel more “classy” or something – but at least did not deter me from wanting to play yet another DD game.
The graphics were simple but also nicely drawn, though sometimes there were glitches. An example is the rooster at the bottom of the screen that is supposed to just come out and crow, then go back… but one time I looked and it was sitting there covering the goal score. One of the story screens also had some layout errors, which I hope gets fixed in an update, since I noticed a game updater runs every time you start the game.
I enjoyed the overall cuteness of the game, but to be honest, I think it doesn’t really lend anything new to the Dash franchise. Plus, I felt it was not very difficult to play, except for the last few levels (and there are over 50 levels in the game). Getting an expert score seems truly easy, as long as you remember the chain bonuses, of course. One little secret I had was to allow blocks of cheese to pile up on the cheese-making machine, because that didn’t seem to delay the goats waking up (as the other products do). So get the bonuses for putting away lots of cheese wheels to the stock shed at the end of the day!
At first you start out with just the father doing all the work. Pretty soon the mother starts helping, and eventually the kids get in on the act. You never actually control any of them individually, especially not the son, whose job is just to refill your lemonade stand and hold the phone out for you to answer. The lemonade stand is a key part of the game – seriously if you don’t use it, you will likely not get an expert score as easily! The power boosts are really important and I clicked them whenever they were up.
There were also a few mini-games to give you a little break from all the farming. While you “can’t lose” at these levels, you do have a goal score. The games involve such tasks as picking fruit in the orchard, either picking them before they fall off the tree, or catching them in a basket as they fall, avoiding the rotten fruit. Another involves a match-three type of board where you swap tiles to match and remove products from the board.
Every level has some new challenges, and you can rack your score up by collecting certain products that Flo wants in particular that day. However that doesn’t actually contribute to getting an expert score, so I didn’t really pay too much attention to that goal.
The game as a whole seems a bit daunting at first, because there seem to be new tasks to learn every level. I believe the first nine levels of the game had something new to learn in each. Not to mention further on in the game there continue to be more tasks (or at least with slight variations) to make the game more complicated. However I really found that it was just more pointing and clicking, just in different places, and as fast as possible. Have fun playing this new farming Dash adventure!
Special thanks to Caitlin Davis and PlayFirst for providing a copy of this game.
