Fruit for the Village Reviews

Was it worth $10? Absolutely not. Is it worth $1.80? Maybe, depending on who you are. If you are expecting a true garden simulator or a game with an interesting story, then you will be quite disappointed on both counts I'm afraid. However, if you are one of those people who likes to take the barest hints of story and setting and weave your own tale from them then there's hope. I don't know if there's a way to win this game or not yet, though I am attempting to find out. There's a story mode and an endless mode which implies that the story mode does reach a conclusion at some point. For me, the true entertainment in this game came from figuring out how to cheat the system in humorous ways. For example, in order to progress in the game you have to continue to buy and send bowls of fruit to the village. In order to do that you must make money. In order to do that you must grow fruit. In order to do that you must either continuously hit a wooden platform with a pair of mallets (I'm telling you this because the game doesn't, so you're welcome one person who's ever going to read this review), or buy an auto clicker to click the platform for you (at a much slower rate than you can do it yourself). It's simple enough until you realize that inflation is no joke in this village's economy. That's when you either fail repeatedly, wave your arms until they fall off and still fail repeatedly, or start discovering the way to cheat the system. Turns out, you can attach as many planters as you want to one auto-clicker as long as the planters aren't touching one another. This makes it unnecessary to grow any fruit yourself and you can pretty much just sit at the bottom of your cave doing nothing but occasionally buying absurdly overpriced fruit bowls until you feel like you've got your money's worth of this game. The voice actor for the guy who drops you little updates over the intercom is pretty good so if you've read the essay above and are still eager to save an entire village from starvation singlehandedly by simply waving your hands like a madwoman for a couple minutes and then just sitting on your ass then, by all means spend your money!

I'd be more lenient if it were an early access title still in development, but the dev seems to have abandoned it regardless. It clearly was not fully tested before submission - both (relatively) minor (text running off the edges of the surface it's supposed to be printed on) and severe (totally game-breaking inability to save) bugs become apparent after only a short time of play. The supposed 'narrative' is delivered exclusively through a series of sterile radio reports from a very bored sounding narrator, and is told at a geologic pace. Even after my full hour+ of play there was no clear plot, just the barest hints of potential conflict brewing. I only played as long as I did, instead of quitting after probably around a half-hour, because of my own stupidly late realization of the ability to double-up (and triple/quadruple/etc. -up) the grow-pads being struck by a single auto-farmer (which the trailer features, had I watched it), which served to renew my interest for a bit longer. I can't recommend to this anyone.

Sadly, I cannot recommend this one, even as a fairly big fan of the clicker genre. There are 2 flower pots, a single and a quad. There's an auto-clicker. That's it. There are absolutely no more growers, no faster clickers, no upgrades, nothing. No progression at all, just building identical clusters of the same 2 flowerpots. Also fairly buggy. The prices went off the edges of the price tag after only about a half hour, and the save game disk turned invisible after the first time it was used. Definitely not worth $10.