Froggy's Farm & Friends is a student project from the Digipen Institute of Technology, teaching the young people of today how (and how not) to do game development. Unfortunately, this year, the students did not graduate... this 3D rendered adventure/crafting game has a lot of flaws that even students should never be permitted to send to publishing.
The graphics, for starters, are a mix of low poly art and 2D sprites plastered onto placeholders... I suspect they didn't get around to replacing those with actual 3D models. So, there's a big lesson for those learning about game development... [i]if you didn't finish the game, [b]don't ship it!!![/b][/i]
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
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 controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
PC gamers will be insulted by the presence of console peasant children's toy controller prompts, despite this being on PC. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're developing for.
While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this game was never accepted on the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 3 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you download this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? And it's free? Nope... sometimes, with free games, you get what you pay for.
So, the game is completely free, as it's a non-professionally developed student project. It's difficult to say it's appropriate for colleges and schools to publish every bit of work their students produce (whether the students pass the course or not), because this is of questionable value for the most important people in the gaming industry - the gamers. Regardless in many ways, even if this is a student project, it's better than much of the pollution on Steam (asset flips and other shovelware/cash grabs). Ultimately, however, the low quality here makes it not really worth the download.
