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Showing 8 reviews for Mr Perry's Farm. all reviews

Mr Perry's Farm
by Ben 'Bruce "entheh" Perry' Wieczorek-Davis
all reviews of Mr Perry's Farm

Review by MarkOates all reviews by MarkOates

There's a lot going on in this game, but unfortunately I didn't have enough time to play by trial and error. A simple set of starter instructions would be great!

Otherwise, nice animations, and open-ended gameplay!

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 3 Technical 5 Genre 5

Review by Eric all reviews by Eric

Blowing up animals on the farm is fun, but figuring out how to play the game is a big pain in the butt. The lack of clear instructions greatly impedes upon my enjoyment of the game. I do like the sound effects and the in-game level editor though (very impressive). Adding instructions (and a windowed mode) would greatly improve the enjoy-ability, however.

**EDIT**
Bruce Perry explained the game in better details on the Allegro forums (https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/616296/1023053#target), which prompted me to play again. The updated version with windowed mode improved my experience, and now that I know what everything does, it's a better game. I still think adding in-game instructions would have improved the overall experience, as would adding a "winnable" goal.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 3 Genre 4

Review by GullRaDriel all reviews by GullRaDriel

Haaa, the farm. I enjoyed to make strange looking things that went blowing in all directions.
It was a fun entry and I enjoyed playing it, even if the building system confused me !!

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 4

Review by Gassa all reviews by Gassa

This seems to be an Incredible-Machine-like simulator of whatever you engineer of the provided components. There are a few different species of farm animals on the field. You place some kind of machine on the field, along with instructions and additions, and also some food for various species, too. After that, you hit "Go", and the board inhabitants do their business while you read some nice home-brew poetry.

Regarding the rules, there are snow as one of the possible effects in your machine, the aforementioned poetry, crafting as the genre, pathfinding for animals seeking their matching food, and some Unicode in the text.

The overall feeling is that the game offers much more than it cares to explain. There are quite a few possible effects and interactions, but no tutorial, by text or doing or otherwise, to show them off properly. Still, the game engine works solidly, and exploring without any hint whatsoever can be seen as a flavor of fun.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 5 Technical 4 Genre 4

Review by miquelfire all reviews by miquelfire

Writing games from scratch, a pain that can leave you with no time to add some polish that at least makes the game playable without waiting on reviews. I'm sure if there was reusable code to be had for the programmer, this would be a great game.

Overall, the rules are clearly in place. The only iffy bit would be the snow, but it's there at least.

This game might be more fun if at least the readme tried to explain what everything did, and polished if there were an in-game tutorial of sorts.

Sadly, I'm lacking time to even give this game a just review, and from what I seen, I might be giving it too low of a score for overall as a result. I really wish my free time didn't end with the compo...

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 4 Technical 5 Genre 3

Review by SiegeLord all reviews by SiegeLord

I don't think I've ever caused as much mayhem with farm equipment as I have in Mr Perry's farm. While the game doesn't give much hint as to what you're meant to do in it, creating contraptions whose only purpose, it seems, is utterly demolish poor farm animals caused a lot of mirth to be had in my experience. Unlike most other games, crafting truly had a functional impact on the game that allowed the player to use his creativity to affect the game world.

To the extent that this is a bit of a sandboxy game, I also liked the inclusion of the map editor, which enabled me to create levels of destruction not imagined even by the game's creator.

I particularly enjoyed the poetry and the Japanese exclamations uttered by the animals.

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 3 Technical 5 Genre 4

Review by NunoMartinez all reviews by NunoMartinez

Tryed in two different computers (32bit and 64 bit) with two different OS (WinXP and Win7): Both them failed with exception "Bad file description". Could not vote.

Scores: Overall None Artistical None Technical None Genre None

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

This games involves crafting a weird contraption made of self-replicators, bombs and weather generators, farm animals, and then blowing it all up.

Crafting stuff and then destroying it all again is a tried and tested concept since "Lemmings" and "Sim City", so I think you're definitely on to something here.

As a puzzle concept it is all very experimental. It certainly takes a few tries to see where it's all going, and I'm not sure if it can stand on it's own as a puzzle game, but it should be able to with a few tweaks. Maybe if you added something about growing food using sun and rain? Maybe some clever arrangements of food could give you multipliers? Also, it seems that farm animals may occupy the same tile, so they overlap and you can't see exaclty how many there are (and this supresses the mayhem a little). The game throws you in the deep end, a bit more time tweaking the puzzles and introducing concepts gently would have changed this from a decent entry into a great entry.

Also, this game features the best home-made poetry of all entries this year.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 5 Technical 4 Genre 5