I’ll be honest, I gave this a try because of an offer of “get 2000 points when reaching level 30 within 10 days” via a certain site, which would get me a $20 Amazon gift card. I’ve played Family Farm Seaside casually for a couple of years now, and I still manage my farm for a few minutes every day. I thought Farmville 3 could be another enjoyable distraction and something I can play without the motion sickness coming into play. Well… I didn’t get the motion sickness and my experience was anything but enjoyable, so let me begin bitching about it.
I breezed through the initial 8 levels in record time, but it was about here that I realized what was going on with the leveling up mechanics. In typical mobile game fashion, Farmville 3 tries to convince you to spend money every single change it gets, ad nauseam.
You plant crops, breed animals, build animal pens and crafting stations, craft goods, fill orders, and clear debris around your farm. Resources do spawn in the farm periodically, so at least there’s always something there to clear up: wood, dirt, flowers, fibers. To clear these, first you need the respective NPC (farmhand), since each does its own thing. Second, you need energy, which comes in limited supply. At level 28, I have about 70 energy. Considering a stone path costs 11 to clear and other things cost 15 or more, you really are limited in what you can do. It replenishes very slowly, and if you want more – ONE more – , go watch some ridiculous fake “I won a ton of money” ad for whatever slots game. You might get lucky to unearth a special crate when clearing debris, but they require diamonds (currency that you purchase with real money) to open. Others might require keys, which are few and far between from doing other tasks.
So how do you get experience? You’d figure building and harvesting would give you some, but no. Building crafting stations gives you an amazing 5 experience. Getting a baby animal gives you another 5 if they are the basic animals, and going up by 2 if it’s the next animal in line. That’s right, breed 2 pigs of one kind, get a different kind. And no, you cannot breed across colors, so there is no breeding that brown cow with the white one, sorry! I found this out when I had more chickens than I could accommodate in my coops: 4 chickens of different colors two types of ducks, and the odd chicken out. I’m not entire sure how one gets ducks from breeding chickens (or chipmunks from breeding hedgehogs, for that matter) but none of the ones in the coops could breed with each other. The odd chicken out was marked “homeless”, but I had a matching pair in one of the coops, so I had to build another pen for it to run to. Because whatever animal you get immediately runs into any available spot in any coop.
To build an animal pen, it’s not enough to just pay for it with the regular in-game currency… you need to harvest enough wood from whatever is laying around your farm, and wait however long until it’s done. To top it off, they make it harder by not letting you move the animals between pens to pair them up to breed. Terrible, terrible system! And there’s very little help to be found throughout gameplay, so you’re on your own trying to figure things out.
After your baby animal grows, you can’t keep the parents. They become “elders” and are sent away to.. let’s call it retirement. You sell them for the stupidly low price of 10 coins… the same animal you bought for 800 at the goods store just to get some experience and breed. Talk about a reverse cash cow…
So with all the hinderance from energy limitations, resource limitations, space concerns (not only farm land but silo and barn capacity) and very limited experience, I can see how one would feel inclined to purchase premium currency. But premium currency seems to be overpriced for what you get. As an example, the lowest pack of diamonds costs $6.50 +tax and gives you 450 diamonds. One animal crate in the goods store costs 80 diamonds and you can get 3 animals from one. So this would get you 5 crates, or 15 animals. You’d get an average of 75-100xp from obtaining those, plus whatever you manage to obtain from breeding them. That’s not even half a level past level 25!
The best way I found to get experience was to plant, craft, sell resources and fill orders so I could purchase animals from the regular goods store. Except one costs 800 coins, and you are limited to about 4 per day. Again, more limitations. There’s an order board on your farm that asks for all kinds of items, Fill these orders and ship them out to fill a meter and get a bonus crate. The amount of work that goes into these orders past level 20 is absolutely ridiculous, and the rewards become equally ridiculous since you don’t always get animals. The boat orders are no better, and they even pay you LESS than what the item is worth if selling from the barn.
There are other premium currencies that allow you to change the look of your buildings and other structures, decorative items, and stickers… It takes several stickers to improve your NPC’s levels, and ironically, I found that after 3 levels, they were still as bad as they were at level 1. Again, more crap that is unnecessary. I don’t care if that NPC said he just became more efficient, it STILL costs me the same amount of energy to clear that same stone path! To top it off, at some point I noticed that clearing repeated debris of the same kind was costing +1 each time. What’s up with that?
I can’t stress it enough, it’s painstakingly dull waiting for a single item to finish crafting… an hour and a half for a sandwich? Are you kidding me? I could make a shitload of sandwiches in that time in real life!
Expanding your farm is no better. You are locked to a specific progression path, so it doesn’t allow expansion in a more personalized way. It forces you to unlock this or that area before you reach another, or go back and forth between different areas of the farm. I don’t like this at all. Not only it’s limited, it’s also not allowing you to optimize space. Speaking of optimizing space, you can only move ONE ITEM AT A TIME. No mass select groups of items to move them to another area, and be prepared for whatever you are dragging to be “dropped” and return to initial position because the item is lagging behind the speed of your cursor/finger.
There is a social component where you join a co-op and help other players, but again, it’s very limited. You can only request one item at any given time and have to wait hours to request another, without the ability to cancel what’s already there. You can only send two items to help with someone else’s request, and you can’t request any help with the boat or board orders. It seems like the co-op was just thrown in there without much thought.
As for other issues, there were some in the technical aspect of things. I experienced the game going down for hours on three occasions, and frequently getting stuck on the loading screen with an error message. And before you say anything, it was not my internet connection nor my device. Other times, everything would freeze when dragging an item to be crafted at any given station. There are also collision issues where NPCs and animals will push each other around the farm.
For further annoyances, you have time-wasters in the form of stupid animations whenever an animal gets a baby, whenever the baby grows into an adult, whenever a farmhand NPC levels up or a new one is unlocked. I don’t care about the little animal or NPC dance and confetti going around, just let me either skip it or have the option to turn this off!
Painfully slow level progression, idiotic and useless rewards aside from animals – which are the focus of this game – and repetitiveness basically sum it up here. Overall, I felt like I wasted my time. Farmville 3 is not at all what I expected, and my expectations were already set pretty low. It’s nothing more than a pay to win title designed by a greedy company just to make a few bucks out of you.