Green Farm

If console gamers are lampooned for their everlasting love of space marines, then certain quarters of the casual gaming fraternity are equally vulnerable thanks to their neverending desire to run virtual farms.

In fact, merely running them isn't enough.

The real thrill appears to come from telling the world about every single aspect of their day to day management, flooding social streams with the news that their crops have been harvested, or their chickens have formed a military alliance in a bid to overthrow us pesky humans and rule the world.

If only it was that exciting.

Farming Farmville

For better or worse, Gameloft's Green Farm – the publisher's unashamed attempt to take on Zynga at its own game – doesn't actually afford you the option of filling in your friends about the developments on your scrap of land, though it does come with a canny bit of promo for the game's (typically more social) Facebook variant.

In its mobile form, this is a far more solitary affair, although it does stick fairly rigidly to the model practised by the scores of other farming games doing the rounds.

Growing crops, therefore, is the be all and end all, with Green Farm equipped with a keen variety of fruit and veg to grow, from those that take mere seconds to bloom to those that require a little longer under the sun.

The usual process of cultivating the land before sowing seeds is in full working order here, and there's also the risk of your crops withering away if you don't harvest them on time. Green Farm – as its name suggests – also comes with something of an environmental bent, with organic goods generating larger profits, albeit over a longer period.

Key to all of this, however, is the fact that every action you take uses up credit that is regained through the sale of your crops. It's a cycle that keeps you playing, even if you're not entirely sure why.

Extra cash can also be tapped up by taking on challenges set by your neighbours, though sadly said characters aren't fellow players but rather typically generic NPCs. That may well be a limitation that owes more to hardware than it does a lack of ambition from the developer, but it's a key loss nonetheless.

For that reason – and the fact that, by and large, Green Farm brings nothing especially revolutionary to the social gaming genre – Gameloft's mess around in the mud gives an adequate snapshot of the kind of experience offered by rival releases on Facebook, but never really blossoms into anything of note in its own right.