Farm Life: Natures Adventure is a free mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as a paid product, as if it was a real PC game (it's not)... it's a cash grab from greedy mobile devs. The mobile app is just an incredibly lame, shallow ripoff of Stardew Valley from a morally bankrupt mobile dev, keen to steal the ideas of others in the hope of scraping up a few pounds. The result is not a fantastic game, but more pollution on Steam that should never have been accepted on the store if Valve had a QA department.
What really surprised me most about this is that Google actually accepted this onto the Play store. I guess they had the work experience kit try his hand at QA. Curious footnote there, that guy now works at McDonalds scraping the grease out of deep friers with his fingernails. They don't let him touch any tools or equipment after they found out he was the guy at Google who let this garbage onto their app store. He just can't be trusted.
Anyway about the game... it's truly terrible, on par with the other garbage from this developer. For starters it doesn't actually work, the interface is basically so unpolished it's largely incomplete. The developer couldn't work out how to put the mouse pointer in the foreground, so good luck clicking around the interface on this broken heap of trash. Let's go over some more defects. There's a lot, because this really, really is garbage.
From a technical perspective, as a mobile app, this doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The implementation here is of such poor quality, the developer couldn't work out how to make the mobile app display in fullscreen, it only runs in a window.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the mobile app unplayable for differently-abled gamers, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
Because this is a mobile app, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the iPhones that the mobile app was designed for. These are unfortunate handicaps and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was an afterthought for the iPhone developers who are to blame for this. The mobile app is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for mobile phones forces upon a game. Once more, mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone. I didn't spend thousands on building a gaming rig just so I could pretend it's an iPhone.
Some of the defects in the mobile app can be attributed to the poor choice of using node-webkit/NW.js instead of a serious game engine. This is a very poor quality toolset for gaming, sometimes used by amateur developers as it doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities because it's primary function for games is to make simple HTML/browser/simple mobile apps rather than full fledged PC games (and given we are here for PC games, you can see why this is a problem). Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine.
These technical defects push this mobile app below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
You don't have to take my word about how bad the mobile app is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Farm Life: Natures Adventure has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the mobile app absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for completing the tutorial, trivial to achieve, but less than 3 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the mobile app. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this mobile app was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the mobile app. But this isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 3 percent of players bothered playing the mobile app for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this mobile app to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother to played the mobile app? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game.
That tells us people only really bought this mobile app for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the mobile app just has a couple of players every week running up the mobile app and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many mobile apps like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
Once more we see greedy mobile devs trying to scam PC gamers. On Steam, this is $1 USD, on app stores, it's free. Mobile devs must learn PC gamers are not here to be gouged, and can't be expected to pay a premium for a free mobile app just because it's been lazily dumped on Steam. This is unacceptable disrespect for PC gamers. Because this can be played free elsewhere, and because of the other defects, it's impossible to recommend. Who do they think we are?
