Harvest Moon: Frantic Farming

It’s been said that in these financially troubled times the appeal of organic food is beginning to wear off. When your wages have been slashed, your partner made redundant, and with the cost of living continuing to rise, it’s hard to see the value in paying double for a bunch of carrots.

Even though Gordon Ramsay says you effing well should.

Well, if our organic veg is grown the way Harvest Moon: Frantic Farming suggests it is, I can understand why it would be so expensive. It’s bloomin’ hard work, and requires a near-genius level of intellect to succeed in.

Hard graft

Your little pixie farmer works a grid-based field of vegetables alone, and it’s up to you to rearrange the veggies (you can pick up and move any vegetable) into the most efficient formation for him. These veggies come in four distinct states of growth - seedling, sprout, small vegetable, and ripe vegetable - and they can only be made to transition from one to the next by watering them.

Our pixie chum is eager to do this watering work, but he can only cover the four squares immediately adjacent to his position, and he’ll only water the crops once per move (advancing them one stage of growth at a time).

Additionally, he’ll only move when there’s a fully ripe vegetable to be picked in a square directly next to him.

Awkward sow and sow

Mission mode takes this dynamic and builds a series of tightly choreographed puzzles around it. You’re given a limited number of moves in which to create a single continuous veggie run for our pointy eared farmer.

The trouble is, this gets extremely tough from level seven onwards. While I’m certainly not the sharpest plough in the field, I’ve played enough puzzlers to know when one is pitched a little too high, and mission mode is pitched too high.

Score attack removes these constraints and simply tasks you with building as big a score as possible by chaining combinations by the variety of vegetable and powering up your rainy special move. However, it lacks the tightly constructed feel of Mission mode, and simply isn’t as compelling as the better puzzlers on the market.

Harvest Moon: Frantic Farming is a novel addition to the mobile puzzler field, and a stiff challenge for those who like their puzzlers served al dente. However, with a poorly pitched difficulty level in its best mode, and a lack of compelling action in the other, this is one vegetable that will be a little too tough for many to digest.

Harvest Moon: Frantic Farming

Frantic Farming is an innovative and attractive puzzler, but its cute looks clash variously with an overly difficult Mission Mode and an uninspiring Score Attack mode
Score
Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.