I know that town building games are popular right now but I before I started this process, I didn’t expect for so many of the top games to be so bloody similar. Hay day is another naff isometric building game where you stupidly try to build up a farm from nothing, as tediously as possible.
There are good reasons to avoid building your farm in the middle of nowhere on a field full of rocks. Agricultural reasons, financial reasons, logical reasons. The goal of this game though, is to defy all these reasons and build a farming empire from shit and boulders.
I got as far as raising 3 chickens. I’d be a terrible farmer. All the competition and manual labour. Also, I really hate scarecrows telling me what to do.
Or else it gets the hose again
After realising that this was another one of these types of boring bait-and-switch games and then trying to bite my hands off in despair, I played the game for a few minutes to find specific things to poke holes in and my first task involved swiping to harvest some crops – I said to myself “Oh, they’re going to involve some unique mechanics for each task … maybe this game will be different and instead of spending purchasable coins, I’ll be able to complete tasks with a sort of miniature version of manual labour.”
That button should say “uninstall immediately”.
Since this was the first screen displayed to me, I didn’t really think that pay-to-play was off the table but I did genuinely think that maybe I’d be able to perform tasks with a variety of gestures. What an optimistic buffoon I was!
Yes, I am a dreamer. The “swipe to do stuff” action is the same action for everything. Swipe to feed the chickens. Swipe to paint the barn. Swipe cover up an industrial accident. Swipe to assassinate the belgian health inspector. Swipe to join the choir invisible. Wait, where’s swipe to uninstall?
I didn’t actually give the game the usual 5 minute minimum playing time. I kept hitting connection errors and getting booted out of the game, what a bastard I am! Trying to play the game offline! Do I want the developers to starve just because I am not within range of a wifi hotspot? Yes. That’s exactly what I want. Developers of these games are human leeches… for money, or… a better analogy.
I did try to reconnect a few times, but it didn’t checkpoint frequently and I had to repeat a bunch of monotonous chores and barely avoided headbutting my phone into a thousand shattered fragments in frustration. It wasn’t worth the effort, much like real farm work.
Don’t play Hay day if you like enjoying yourself.
Hay day is a pineapple. It is bloody difficult to consume without a bit of background help, it’s a big nuisance and even if it seems kind of sweet, it’s eating you inside.
Games Whinge 