Hope’s Farm

Genre: Match-3 Puzzle / Management Sim

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Green Sauce Bundle, along with Secrets of Magic: Happy Halloween)

Hope’s Farm is a Match-3 Puzzle game with Management Simulation elements released on PC and mobile devices in 2019 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2021. This game has players planting crops in a very light Management Simulation-style game, and then delivering those crops via a Match-3 Puzzle Game.

The presentation in this game is mostly not going to impress anyone – this absolutely looks like a mobile style game with its simple cartoony characters, simple 3D visual style, and sound effects that are undoubtedly fair use sounds. This game does have an (amateurishly) voiced intro with some character art, but for the most part, the only real personality this game shows is in its soundtrack, which uses simple banjo music that works really well for this game’s farm theme.

The feeling of this being a quick and easy mobile port is made even stronger by this game’s controls and mechanics – players do not use the gamepad to control the game directly. Instead, they must move a cursor on-screen to do everything. Even clearing a notification window cannot be done by pressing the B button. No, you need to move the slow cursor up to the X box in the upper corner of that notification to clear it. Even for a mobile port, this is extremely lazy, and it makes the game far less enjoyable. At the very least this game makes use of decent touchscreen controls in handheld mode, which was clearly how this game was intended to be played in the first place.

The mobile design is also reflected in this game’s structure – you’re encouraged to use multiple currencies to buy helpful items throughout the game, in a structure that’s clearly a holdover from the mobile version’s microtransactions. There are thankfully no microtransactions present here, but the game still suffers from the legacy those microtransactions leave behind.

When it comes to the gameplay, the Management Simulation elements here are extremely minimal – you simply select which crops to grow based on your demand, water them, and harvest them. There doesn’t appear to be a time limit of any sort, just a limit on resources, so you can take as long as you want deciding what to grow if you like, although it’s hardly complicated enough to justify thinking hard about this.

No, the real meat of this game comes in its Match-3 Puzzle gameplay, which is… well, pretty much exactly like Candy Crush, Bejewelled, and a zillion other mobile-style Match-3 Puzzle games. It’s not bad, but it does nothing truly unique or interesting with the extremely well-worn formula.

The sad thing is, even if that sounds good to you, even if you take the view that “I just want something like Candy Crush”, Hope’s Farm will still disappoint you with its terrible controls and mediocre Management Sim gameplay clogging up that Puzzle Game experience. Also, the $20 price tag is absolutely outrageous, and clearly intended to make it look like an amazing deal when this game gets put on sale for $2. However, even at $2, I’d say this game isn’t worth the price – you’re better off simply downloading Candy Crush to your Smartphone. Or, if you’re looking for a similar game on Nintendo Switch that’s actually worth playing, the free-to-play Gems of War is an excellent choice. As such, there’s little reason to bother with Hope’s Farm.

tl;dr – Hope’s Farm is a Match-3 Puzzle Game with Management Simulation elements that is very clearly a lazy mobile port, with terrible controls due to a lack of proper optimization on Nintendo Switch, and clear signs that this was a game originally designed around a microtransaction model. The Puzzle gameplay is uninspired, and the Management Sim elements are so simple that all they manage to do is to interrupt the Puzzle gameplay. There are better games in both genres on Nintendo Switch, don’t bother with this one.

Grade: D

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