Tiny Farm update #2

Back in April, I had a bitchfest about Tiny Farm and raged about its pay-or-wait model. After a few months of expanding the farm, buying more animals and mastering them, I found that it’s definitely one of the more playable freemium titles.

One of the biggest criticisms about anything freemium is that the developer does things that limit your gameplay experience such as restricting inventory size and doing various other things that basically goad you into buying into their IAP feature.

Believe it or not, Tiny Farm is quite the exception to this. The reasons are these:

1. There’s nothing that delays or obstructs your enjoyment of the game or tests your patience like Rule the Kingdom, for example, where you have to wait and wait and wait for your hitpoints to replenish before you can continue on with a mission without fear of dying from a single enemy attack. (A wait and play RPG/town-management mix is pretty disgusting, if you think about it.)
   .
2. There’s no need to rely on special currency (re: Bells) to expand your farm as the regular currency does the job. In comparison to a game like Tiny Tower where you have to keep pumping in Tower Bux to increase store stock, this is a pretty generous design. Even base animals that can only be purchased with Bells can be obtained through a Ranger and gold. (I’m not sure if the same could be said about the recent Talking Animal additions like the Talking Hampshire, however.)

Of course, there are still many things that require Bells but a Christmas Tree or Bell Tree churns out Bells at a regular pace — albeit a rather slow one. Levelling up and mastering animals can also net you some Bells. You will have to save up immensely to afford anything that costs 50 Bells and beyond though. Well, there ARE those Tapjoy offers too. :3

Anyway, here’s what my farm currently looks like. I have about 3 pages of animals in the barn too but since I’m aiming to make a sheep and alpaca-only farm, I have no need to place them all onto the field. (And it’s not like I can since I can only fit a max of 23 animals right now.)  There’s non-woolly animals on the range too because I’ve yet to master them.

Oops. I forgot I wrote a status update at the end of April too. ^o^~ https://koukoupuffs.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/tiny-farm-update/