Hay Day 1.61.264

In Hay Day, you will be managing a slowly developing farm in order to provide different produce to the community, trade with others and make money. This casual freemium game revolves around buying farming plots and enclosures and populating them with crops and animals. What's actually surprising (for this type of game) is that there are actual production chains that make sense and even branch off, providing the player with CHOICES.

The promise is great. You'll start off by plotting some land and getting a chicken coop. Planting and harvesting is very easily done, by tapping, selecting the action and then swiping the finger over the plots that you want to influence. This is also the case when feeding and harvesting animals.

The produce of your farm can be sold in three ways. From time to time, buyers will come in requesting different goods (and paying for them of course). More complex requests will arrive on the notice board. These will usually consist of two or three different things, but will also yield more money. Finally, you will get to sell to the community. Whatever you feel you have enough of you may sell in order to make room in your storage. You can freely set the quantity and the price of your packages, then wait for players to buy them. The local newspaper will contain offers from other players and will also publish yours. This is a pretty neat system that allows you to focus on one area and get the remaining goods from the market. That works of course, if everybody is paying attention to what the market is selling and focuses on what's missing. Sadly, the player base did not caught up with this simple economic concept. So all you have is people selling wheat and eggs when everybody can produce those at a moment's notice.

That is indeed somewhat of a disappointment, but it is not the game's fault. What does twist my noodle, are the Hay Day's gameplay limitations. As expected, whenever you wish to make some real progress, you'll need to spend some crystals. I swear, these things make an appearance in every freemium just like Chokobos do in Final Fantasy games, except that they're not as welcome or cute to behold. Firstly your level limits you not only by what you can construct, but also how much of it. For example you can only get 3 plots of arable land per level, which is an annoying limitation, as plots are virtually free to place. The second thing is that buildings take a lot time to come into play after being purchased. I also have a suspicion that the displayed timers run slower than normal, to make you lose patience and bring out those crystals. I've personally timed them and I think they skip a second for every 3 or 4 minutes.

Another "charming" aspect is the teasing that Hay Day does, again not uncommon to freemiums. Your farm is surrounded by rocks and trees, which need to be removed in order to place more stuff. However, you are a very pretentious farmer, and won't use just anything to cut down or dig up obstacles. Oh no, every type of tree needs some special type of ax or saw, and these only last for one specimen each, which is not nice. Rocks also require preferential treatment. While big rocks need a stack of TNT, small rocks can only be removed by a single stick of dynamite. These are separate items. Upgrades also need all sorts of little items, including boards - which you don't get by felling trees, but are awarded randomly when building certain things for the first time, or leveling up.

At the end of the day

I suspect that this distribution model makes much more money per customer than a reasonably priced full package, but I'm so disappointed when I see good ideas marred in this pay-to-win plague of a system. Also, one of my tablets crashed and did not recover after launching Hay Day. Play at your own risk.