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Farm Punks is a wild game about guiding food and fruit to market down deadly courses

Farm Punks is a wild game about guiding food and fruit to market down deadly courses
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| Farm Punks

Fling yourself downhill as food, fruit and farmyard animals in Farm Punks, a quirky platformer from Sleeping Giant and publisher Noodlecake.

While there's certainly a few games which cater to the farming simulation wants of the populace, Farm Punks looks to cater to those who like flinging and guiding various things down massive networks of hills. It's as simple as waiting for a fruit to grow, plucking it from a tree, launching it from a cannon and then steering it with swipes (or making it jump with held-down presses) to see how far you can get it. The further they get down the hill, or if they make it to a produce stand, the more money they get. Simple, albeit unrealistic.

The gain for each run is cash and scraps. You can use both of these to upgrade, unlock and level up your plants. Do this and they'll roll further and make more farm bucks when they sell, they'll also be better at completing each fruit-specific set of challenges. Complete enough of those challenges and you'll make some cold, hard gold. That gold can be used for further upgrades, but also to buy more plots. You don't NEED to grind for gold though, swapping out plants is easy enough, but you do lose your levels when you do it.

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It's imposible to deny that Noodlecake are giants within the mobile publishing space. Their name has been attached to some absolutely massive mobile ports and titles over the last while, including Death Road to Canada (which I'm happy to see the Pocket Gamer alumni liked talking about as much as I do), Typeshift, Absolute Drift and Golf Blitz. Farm Punks definitely feels like it will stand out among their catalogue, it already feels great to play in its beta state. 

With such a simple gameplay loop it leaves only the character (and characters) of the game to keep you coming back for more. Once you start unlocking more plants and more slots to store them in you'll be introduced to a whole gang of othere things to roll down the hill.

At first you start off with different apple brands, Granny Smith is represented by an aged apple with a cane, while Macintosh is a clunky, cuboid computer. There's over 80 different types to send rolling down the hill, each gated in different tiers of plants. They exist within sub-categories which each have their own achievements (Avocado, Apple, etc), but they also roll based on the size and shape of them. 

There's also a few interesting bonuses depending on the object. Avocados, for instance, have a second life as the stone once they've worn down their fruity exterior.

Farm Punks is currently in beta access and should be launching soon. At the moment the biggest issue with the game, from where I stand, is the loading times: They're clunky, the animation jostles and judders. It would be much better if replaced with a screen showing objectives, or fruit growing, to draw attention away from the heavy loading going on.

Farm Punks can be downloaded from the App Store and Play Store right now.

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Dann Sullivan
Dann Sullivan
A job in retail resulted in a sidestep into games writing back in 2011. Since then Dann has run or operated several indie game focused websites. They're currently the Editor-in-Chief of Pocket Gamer Brands, and are determined to help the site celebrate the latest and greatest games coming to mobile.