Buy Farm for your Life

Ok, my first review ever. The reason I bought this game was because I was going through one of those "I have hundreds of games but nothing to play" phases on my day off. It honestly took me by surprise, and I quickly got addicted.

Farm for your Life seems to have been put together by ideas from other games.
-You have the farming aspect which is similar to that of Harvest moon and runic frontier. The farming is the bread and butter of the game, as you can imagine by taking a look at the title. You have some land, you clear it, plow it, barter for seeds, sow them, water them, and occassionally sprinkle some fertilizer to keep the plants from dying.

-You have your restaurant, which is really the feature that caught me. You serve dishes made with your produce at the restaurant. Instead of getting paid in game currency or something, you barter with your clients and can actually choose what you want from their inventory (which is pretty awesome when you desperately need more of a specific supply). As you expand your farm, you can upgrade your restaurant to accommodate more people and expand the range of dishes you serve. Also, to learn any dish, you must first purchase it from the peddler, go to the oven, and play fruit ninja with the ingredients. The better you do, the faster you can cook that particular dish.

-You then have zombies. When night falls, zombies pop out from paths at the edge of the map and walk ever slowly towards your farm and restaurant to destroy it. Like Plants vs Zombies, you will end up using your crops to kill them by throwing it at them. You can also use items you bartered for in your restaurant to create defensive turrets like a corn cannon to cover one side of the map while you fight in the other.

This all seems like a lot to do, and it is, specially when your farm and restaurant are heavily upgraded. But you recieve NPC help in exchange for shelter and a daily meal. They pop up as you expand.

The story overall was decent, but not much different than endless. It could use a few more tweeks.

I would give the game a 9/10. With a little more indepth story and some more content, it would be perfect.

What is Farm for your Life?

Overview:
Farm for your Life is a nice mix of casual farming and casual restaurant simulation, without however a time limit on the restaurant part. People will pay you and stay until they are served, taking up spaces in the restaurant instead, so you can't get any more customers until they are gone.

The game is controlled entirely with the mouse from an isometrical perspective. It clearly is inspired by games such as Harvest Moon or its clones without however reaching that depth. There are two relevant options at the start of a game - campaign or free play, zombies attack at night or not. If you choose the campaign mode you start with practically nothing, and can build up your farm relatively freely. The ultimate goal then is to survive the zombie apocalypse. If you choose to be attacked at night, you must waste your resources on defeating zombies or they plunder your farm.

Gameplay:
The game, as said above, is controlled with the mouse entirely. The controls are 95 percent fine, but if you have the shovel selected you can very easily destroy your plants by accident. You can select four tools, but with the exception of the shovel they are used automatically without being selected anyway. In your farm and restaurant level, you build up the farm while in the forest level you can collect wood and stone which are needed for buildings and stone as ammunition for the slingshot weapon. Every resource except coins can also be used for trading. Coins seem to be only a tutorial leftover without any real use.

The farming is done by planting seeds, watering plants and fertilizing them every now and then. Talking to plants makes them grow faster, but the effect seems limited, probably to one growth boost per individual harvest. Seeds are very expensive but only expire if you don't take care of them. If they are watered and fertilized - water is for free while fertilizer costs a small amount of resources equal to one harvest or two for corns - before the meters drop to zero, the plants last forever, so you make a profit sooner than later.

The restaurant must be built first with your wood and other resources, then guests will visit it to eat something. You can buy various recipes at the merchant for high prices, but they eventually amortise. The guy in front of it allows you to buy improvements and other useful tools. After a while - probably depending on how many recipes you have - several other people join you and automatically cook or farm. The help is very welcome since the AI works very fast. However, it once messed really up for me, resulting in plants being not watered, etc.
You can have chickens and cows but they take a long time to produce eggs and milk and eat a lot, so you will need to grow wheat and grass for them. As far as I see, they won't die even with few food but won't produce resources then.

At night you get attacked by zombies if you chose so in the settings. You should turn this off since it is just annoying. Zombies take several resources to be defeated and give no benefits. They destroy your fences pretty quickly as well, so later several weapon systems are a must, which - you guessed it - also eat a lot of resources. Slingshots take stone and seem pretty fine, but you need many then. Corn cannons are also fine, but eat a lot of corn. At first it is fun but if you need to defend against 5 or 6 zombies every night it becomes just annoying. Just turn it off before you start the game, unless you enjoy survival things.

Logic error: The zombies in the forest attack you - you must avoid them to keep your resources. The zombies in the farm steal only your resources and maybe destroy your things (I didn't test that).

Graphics:
The graphics are the usual casual cuteness style. Positive is that you can customize how your character should look either at the start of the game or later by entering your house - which is the only purpose of your house.

Sound:
The sound is fine, it is nothing spectacular but also not disturbing.

Achievements:
Several achievements are bugged, as far as I read. This diminishes the value of an otherwise enjoyable game.

Recommended:
Since the developer seems to have given up the game in a state with a few bugs left, it is worth getting in a sale or - like now at IndieRoyale - in a bundle. The price of 8,99€ would be okay for the length, but not for the gameplay and support. I recommend waiting for a 70p off or more sale if you miss the bundle.

Harvest Moon + survival aspect + zombies + Diner Dash + Fruit Ninja = This game.

It's cute, easy to play, addicting, and fun.

I really wish I could recommend this game. It’s fun and all BUT ….It’s broken and it seems as if the development team has absolutely no intentions on fixing any of its issues. For the first week or so it was out on steam the developer was active with the community, but once they made sales.. poof, best magic show disappearing act ever! Check out the HUGE Bug Reports discussion in the games Community Hub, if you glance it over you can see the developer say he will look at them all "over the weekend" them come back and say he was too busy to look at them. That was.. over 50 days ago as of this review… still no word on fixes.

I don't think I will ever trust Hammer Labs with my money ever again, Its clear that they are only out to make a quick buck then move on to the next thing, there is no care to if the product actually functions or not.

Farm for Your Life is a fantastic game if you are looking for a little bit of everything - the hybrid genres and gameplay make for a unique and charming take on classic elements that are already very popular on their own. This was a perfect game that I got in a bundle, especially considering that I had already recently played many fun tower-defense games (like Tower Wars) and great restaurant managemen games like Cook, Serve Delicious; and Dead Hungry Diner. This game mixes mechanics from those games very well.

If you like farming (agriculture, AND also RPG/dungeon-style grinding), restaurant management, the zombie theme, tower defense, and bartering systems, then you will really love this game.

The aesthetics are good, the cute character models and graphics remind me a lot of the Mii avatars you can make on the Wii (or your avatars in Xbox Live), with large heads and small bodies. The character customization is limited, but still has a decent variety. The music and sounds are good and match the semi-casual (the game can get brutally difficult if you let it) and (at times) relaxing gameplay.

The controls are easy to learn and the tutorial quickly covers the basics of the game, however, balancing everything there is to do in the game can get overwhelming at times. The learning curve is moderate to difficult, depending on your experience with the different genres present in the game - and especially your ability to juggle different priorities. There is a "peaceful" farming-only mode (no enemy zombies), and if you are not interested in that extra hazard, I suggest you give that a try. Personally, I really believe there is already a lot to do in the game, but I picked the story mode and welcome the added challenge. The story is decent, but many things are left unsaid and you may end up having to consult a guide if you do not understand what to do.

In regards to the actual gameplay, there is a lot of things to do, and each aspect of the game really appeals to me for different reasons.

As a farmer, you can dig areas to plant with your shovel, harvest wood/rocks with your axe/hammer, and use your sickle to collect grass (that you plant), among other things. Be advised, you cannot use these tools to attack zombies. Your plants have two requirements for life: water and health. You are given a blue watering can that can nourish up to 4 plants before you need to refill it - 2 red watering cans are available at the store and can be used to water significantly more plants. For maintaining health, you can use fertilizer on applicable plants - I am fairly certain that doing this will restore a plant's health to full regardless of how low you let it get.

When you harvest plants, you can only hold one item at a time, however, building a crate will allow you to carry up to 4 items.

You also have a kitchen service, and customers will come starting from late morning/early afternoon until the evening (there is a clock that will show you the time splits). These customers will ask for different food/drinks from you, and you can accept/decline, as well as negotiate the terms of the trade. This is one of my most favorite parts, because I have recently gotten into Steam trading and really enjoy it. You can haggle pretty well, and you will also notice that your ability to lowball will increase as you progress through the game (because different plants have different values). You can even trade for plates and cups and use them at the store (extremely high value). Upgrades to your kitchen (and farm) are available here. Examples include more tables, tents (to attract and house helpers), and sprinklers (very useful).

There is a store that provides different recipes and plant seeds - these will expand as you progress through the game. It is almost impossible (if not completely) to haggle with the shopkeeper. There is a good feedback system that will tell you "x more required" for each item you hover over when trying to achieve a balanced trade.

Helps will become available as you progress, and you can assign them to either help with farming or in your kitchen. You must also feed them every early morning before they will work.

To learn recipes, you must do a short mini-game that is a lot like Fruit Ninja - you use the mouse to "slice" the correct ingredients into a pot. You can achieve 1 to 3 stars, and having the max amount will allow you to cook much the item much faster.

You can wander into the forest at any time for rocks and wood, however, zombies are roaming all over the place. If you are touched by one, you will lose all of your collected materials by half. I've noticed that there is a short window after being hit by a zombie where you will be ignored by all zombies. This part can be very annoying, especially if you get trapped by a horde.

At night, zombies will sometimes try to attack your farm. During this part, you can try to herd them by arranging your fences like a maze. There are also turrets you can purchase from the kitchen, each doing significantly more damage than the last. At first, you will most likely be defending your farm by throwing any food items at the zombies.

Admittedly, the AI is not the best, as your helpers will most times prioritize picking up ripe plants versus watering ones that are about to die. I've also noticed that your character will sometimes pick up a plant instead of watering it (happens infrequently).

The game is appropriately challenging and really tests your planning and priotizing skills - do I attend to my farm or my customers first? Expanding takes a lot of work and effot, as it is very easy to become overwhelmed. I once spent an entire day just working on my farm and ignored all customers. You also unlock chickens and cows later on, adding even more variety to the gameplay.

Overall, if you like any of the themes mentioned in the beginning, you should definitely give this game a try. There is even an endless mode that allows you to really unleash your inner farmer. The game may be slow in the beginning, but it quickly picks up in a short amount of time.

Highly recommend!

Cheers,
DJSF @DJSF's Rogue Reviews

There's quite a few directions you can go while playing/farming and that allows you to learn and play again with a better plan.

This game is 3 of my favorite things rolled into one...farming, restaurant, and zombies. The play is pretty straightforward, the graphics are cute, there are even quests.

I kind of love it.

Entertaining for an hour or two, then quickly loses appeal. Harvest Moon + Diner Dash with no story, no objectives, and nothing to hold your attention for terribly long.

I nabbed this game during the Steam Summer Sale and found myself surprisingly engrossed with it for hours. I've been looking for something similar/better than Farmville as I detest playing games on facebook. Especially with the money sink that can occur with them due to power ups and limitations.

Farm for your Life was a fun alternative and with added features (like Zombies!) I found myself to have a lot of fun playing it!

If you like growing things, farming, or gardening in games I would definitely recommend this game for you!

Great indie game, fun to past the time!

This is actually an epic little game, and very cheap. I would highly recommend this to anyone. Very easy to learn and easy to play. The mouse controls everything and it runs really smoothly on my PC. there are a few minor glitches left in the game at this point, but hardly gamebreaking. This is actually one of my favorite games of 2014 thus far and hope there is a sequel!!!
Got this last night and started playing, next time I looked at the clock it was 7 am and the sun was coming up!

I bought this game on sale and it was.. sort of alright for the first 20 minutes. After that it's just a boring mess though.

TL;DR:
+ Character customisation is very basic and quite limited but there's a couple of interesting options to make.
+ The art style for the game is interesting and it's quite well done. It doesn't interest me personally, though.
+ Nice concept for a game.
+ Fruit ninja style minigame is fairly fun because of the physics but it's also quite pointless.

- Has quite a lot of game breaking glitches.
- Expensive at full price (or anything less than a heavy discount) for the amount of content that's here.
- Very repetitive and slow gameplay which has you standing around a lot doing nothing for a lot of the time.
- The trading system in the game is unbalanced. Items such as seeds that you need at the start are so expensive that it takes around half an hour just to buy one seed.
- The english in the game is atrocious. It's obviously not the developers' first language so it's acceptable, but hardly one sentence in the game is spelt or worded correctly.
- The single music track in the game isn't anything special and is quite repetitive.



The first time I played the game, the first 20 minutes went alright, i'd finished the tutorial and I got onto the main game. Then I exited the game and came back to it, and my save file had somehow become corrupted and the game had saved me at the last section of the tutorial but some of the main characters were invisible so I couldn't actually progress.

After I started the game a second time, I got onto the actual main part of the game and honestly, it's just boring.

There's 3 "sections" to the game; Collect ingredients (apparently mostly by farming), restraunt simulator where you serve customers, and then a fruit ninja minigame.
The fruit ninja game from what I could tell was alright but completely pointless and too difficult because the recipes required you to chop so many ingredients in 10 seconds which didn't even appear on time for you to chop them up, nevermind to add them into the bowl as well. You get a star rating but if you had anything more than 10 seconds (which was impossible to get anyway), you only got 1 star for the dish, and it seemed to have no impact on the dish.

Unless i'm missing something, the game is ridiculously slow. There's not really any sense of direction in the game after you start serving customers in the restraunt, You "trade" with customers and they give you an order of what they want to eat, and then sit at the tables eternally. I had a customer sitting at the restraunt taking up space for 3 days because I had to wait for the ingredients to grow for what she wanted to eat.

The controls are awkward. I don't think there's a way to actually drop items from your basket without actually using them up or adding them into your chest. Double clicking seemed to be involved a lot and it didn't seem to always work.

"combat" is horrible. I'm not sure why it was included because it doesn't actually fit in with the game and the zombies don't even really pose as a threat. It's just annoying to have to find something to throw at the zombies when they appear, and for the first hour of the game it seemed to be only one zombie a night that would appear.

There's a trading system in place which allows you to barter for items. But the items that you have to actually buy are so costly that I found myself giving away pretty much all of what I had just to be able to aquire a single seed.

Also, the customers at the restraunt will ask you to cook them things that you haven't even unlocked yet, and if you accept you'll have to have them wait until you've actually unlocked it, and then wait even longer so that you actually have the ingredients to cook it.

There looked to be some sort of exploration aspect to the game but I haven't gotten that far because the game hasn't actually asked me to explore for any reason yet.

OK, so besides the crashing and the broken achievemnts and the failing to load after the game has been beaten... yeah if you don't take all of that into account then the game is pretty fun! It's a really simple farm that you can build anything you want, anywhere you want it. Do what you like each day and build your farm up just the way you like! Fun little minigames make the game more enjoyable and the colorful graphics are also a big plus. It's got it's shortcomings though, it's super short, and has quite a few bugs. I would wait until the developers actually complete the game before buying it, otherwise you will be frustrated as i was while playing it. Hope this helps!

it is really good and fun game guys believe me you will like it, the story mode needs some more quests or some more content. But overall you can really enjoy the game for few hours.

Only in this game survivors stop the zombie attack with cabbage and corn!!!

Farm for your Life is a simple point and click farming/restaurant simulator. It's a mix of Cook, Serve, Delicious! and Harvest Moon. It's polished, but also very simplistic so that anybody can play. It's oddly addicting, although it's also very repetitive. If you're a fan of simple mind numbing repetition than this is a game for you. If you're a fan of simulation, this might also be for you.

[FEATURES]

• Story Mode is very short, but there is also an Endless Mode that will allow to you play until the end of eternity.
  
  
• Characters are customizable whenever you want, however you want at any time. You can go in between genders and there are countless possibilities.
  
  
• The main objectives are to grow crops, raise animals, build a successful restaurant, cook and serve food, gather materials and help a mad scientist cure the 'zombie' problem. Oh, did I mention that there are zombies? You also have to build an array of weapons and defense mechanisms (like fences) to keep the zombies off of your land!

[POSITIVES]

• Easy to play for anybody regardless of how experienced a gamer they are. Easy to follow tutorial that explains anything you'll need to know, and you only have to use the mouse! Very easy to get into and very easy to come back to at any time. Relatively speaking, the game itself also has a very easy difficulty level. The achievements are also pretty easy to obtain.
  
  
• Hours of mind numbing fun. Seriously. Although repetitive, there is enough to do that you don't feel as if you're always doing the same thing, even though there's only a few things that actually need doing.
  
  
• No DLC or add ons of any kind. What you pay for is what you get. The game also has no bugs that I've come across and runs very smoothly.

[NEGATIVES]

• The game has a 'peaceful' mode, but it doesn't actually exist. Zombies will raid your game at night even if you've selected the 'peaceful' game mode. There doesn't seem to be a fix for this in story or endless mode yet.
  
  
• Many of the achievements are bugged, despite a recent patch from the developers. At this point, it seems as if it's going to be forever bugged... so that's really a bummer.
  
  
• The developers seem to be largely finished with the game, so any bugs, compatibility issues, etc that come up may not be fixed. The recent patch that they did, despite their best efforts, didn't seem to change anything at all. I have yet to find much wrong with the game besides the bugged achievements, but other players may be experiencing issues with little to no technical support.
  
  
• Repetition. I put this in the positives as well, but it's a double edged sword. Eventually you're going to get bored, or you'll have done absolutely everything that your farm will be so damn self sufficient that you'll hardly need to play. Also, for those who don't like repetition, this will obviously be a huge minus because that's most of the game's mechanics.

I definitely recommend giving this a try. I would give it a solid 8/10. I've played it over and over again for hours and have enjoyed coming back to it every time.

Really addictive and fun game, if you like and miss harvest moon, this game is for you.

Very much a casual game but very addictive as well, I got this game very cheap during a sale and thought 'yeah, I'll only end up playing this for an hour or so'... 4 hours later I resurfaced.

It's a combination of harvest moon, diner dash and fruit ninja with zombies thrown in. I would classify this game as non violent because when the zombies "attack" you, you just get into a slapfight and are left dizzy at the end (and depending on whether you are in the forest or not as to whether your gathered resources halve). On the farm zombies, go for your crops, not the people and are capable of destrying a farm pretty quickly if you don't fend them off. On the whole they're more annoying than they are threatening, I turned them off after a few nights because I was getting bored of throwing my vegetables at them or building resource chewing defences to throw at them. The meat of the game is in the restaraunt part of the game, you barter meals and goods for parts and seeds and feed the people, once a deal is made, they won't leave until they are fed, so you won't have to worry about them getting mad or anything.

TLDR: Addictive, very shallow, pick it up cheap in a sale.

It seemed interesting enough, and I am a huge sucker for indie games. I was enticed by the idea of micromanaging plant growth with tower defense and a silly art style. As it is, I could only squeeze out about 30 min, and I had had enough.

Bugs, bugs, bugs GALORE! I failed the turtorial missions about 5-6 times due to the game breaking under bugs. The main character freezing, the controls freezing, UI bugs (pop ups that never went away, also freezing or pop ups that never show up; leaving you to guess what you do next), people that get stuck, people that run through walls and typos....omg the typos. I think the writers/editors should go back to 3rd grade where we learn this thing called "proof-reading". Jackfilms's "YGS" series on youtube would evicerate this game. No kidding: there was typo in almost EVERY SINGLE TEXT BOX. I don't care if:

-English wasn't your first language
-Budget
-Time constraints

If 50% of the dialogue in this game isn't grammatcially correct, that's not acceptable in a full release! Fix the bugs! Fix the typos! FIX ANYTHING!!

The idea is you use various tools and abilities to grow plants and use them as weapons. I didn't get far enough to see how it actually works because the developer(s) p***ed off the ice goddess Shiva who froze everything and cursed the land to be invested with bugs while screwing up the language to create the grand Promised Land for Grammar Nazis.

There is no denying it. There is no excuse, explanation, theory or otherwise: the game is a massive cash grab. Unplayable, untolerable. One word review: broken. 0/10

I should have taken the $9.99 and threw it to my dogs. Money better spent.

01/11/2014
Reviewed with a press copy of the game

A really good game to play if you like farming type games with a small bit of tower defence (although you do have the option to remove attacks at night if you just want to farm).

The story is very basic but introduces you to how to play very well and gives you a reason to farm, there is also the 'Endless Mode' which obviously goes on forever and doesn't have a story of any kind, just farm. When the game properly begins you will have to plant crops and chop wood and mine stone so you can build and make various things from recipes to catapults to heed off zombies.

In conclusion the game is very basic but even if it is also a little buggy is a very enjoyable experience and I throughly enjoyed my 2 hours of playing so far so I give it an 8/10 for being fun, interesting and sort of unique.

YouTube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efP99nJ5aiE

goodgoodgoodgood