I’ll admit straight up: I’m a Farm Frenzy fan.  I have a game site subscription, and I have many of the FF games.  They’re a great few-minute diversion.

So when FF2 came out as an XBox Live title, of course I went and picked it up.  It was a decent port of the desktop game, with less than half of the desktop’s achievements, but that’s okay.

Now we have FF2-Pizza Party.  But it ISN’T an XBL title.  Well, shucks.  Okay then; how does it compare with FF2 and the desktop FF2-PP?

FF2-PP for mobile has more achievements than the XBL FF2.  That’s a plus.  While FF2 seemed to be a pretty straight port of the desktop version, with just a very few tweaks (getting two cakes for every one cookie+flour combo has been hard for me to adjust to), FF2-PP seems to be a little better than a straight port: the map screen scrolls around the streets, and it seems to be nicely optimized.  FF2-PP is also a little faster than the XBL FF2!  The chickens are really zooming around the yard.

For the desktop fans, I have a treat for you: FF2 didn’t have the click-to-go-faster production for the buildings, but FF2-PP does!  And yes, you can explode your buildings if they get too hot.  But no, there’s no you-blew-up-your-building-twice achievement in the mobile version.

My only niggling issue is the build signs for the buildings: the icon is just a generic hammer-and-axe building sign, not a symbol of what KIND of building it is.  I would think that that’s going to get very confusing once you start having 6 buildings to build, or start having to replace buildings with others in the same spot.

But on a positive note, they’ve made an adjustment for both FF2 and FF2-PP.  When I originally got FF2, if you accidentally clicked on the upgrade icon on a building, too bad; you’ve just wasted money that you may have needed for something else.  Now, in both games, when you click to purchase a building or upgrade one, you get a pop-up box to confirm or cancel.  Huzzah!!  Ooohh – and it gives you both buildings as an option if you can build 2 on the same spot.  Well, solves part of my problem above, although I’d still like to see the sign have a symbol for the product instead of a generic building sign.

I only grabbed the trial version, just to give it a spin, and you can only go through the first 4 levels on the trial.  Will I be picking up the full game later?  Yup, you betcha! 

Farm Frenzy 2-Pizza Party is $2.99 and can be found in the Marketplace here.

Category: Reviews, Xbox | Tags: Alawar, Farm Frenzy, Melesta, time management games, Windows Phone Comments Off