Working on the farm was never this much fun (believe me, I know).  Green Valley: Fun on the Farm is a classic match-3 puzzler at heart, but includes enough variety, humor, and top-notch production values to help it stand out from the crowd.  But, even with everything that it does right, there’s still a few smudges on this shiny apple.

As our story begins, the Beetle Bug family (consisting of the father, his pessimistic son, and overly-optimistic daughter) has just received word that Uncle Billy Bug has “bought the farm,” so to speak, and left them the family farm.  This business is, in the words of the son, a very fallow farm, really not much to speak of.  It’s up to you to turn this agricultural nightmare into a prestigious plantation.  You’ll start by harvesting vegetables.  This is done in a method similar to games like Cradle of Rome and Age of Emerald, where you trace paths of matching connected pieces to make them disappear.  The larger the trail, the more points you receive.  As you make your matches, the vegetables will fall to the stacks of crates below, where Beetle Bug will collect and transport them.  In many levels, once you have harvested enough vegetables, you will then be able to advance to the next level.  Watch what you are harvesting, because eventually after Beetle has carried enough crates away, there will be no crates under parts of the garden to catch produce.  You have to be aware of where you are making your matches in order to complete the level.

As fun as this initial premise is, the real joy of Green Valley is the multitude of goals that you will be presented while playing the main game.  Some levels will have you making matches in order to move boulders to the bottom of the playfield to remove them.  Others will have you hatching eggs to collect chickens.  There is also variety in the standard levels, as you will have to work around immovable blocks and frozen produce.  All of these different gameplay aspects help to keep the levels interesting and move the game along.  In between levels, you will see the progress of the game as you approach specific upgrade goals, such as planting an orchard to start growing and harvesting fruit, clearing land for more fields, or building a greenhouse.

The main problem with the game is something that I’ve pointed out in reviews before that seems to be a trend of late in casual games: the grammar is atrocious.  The spoken dialog in Green Valley is so well done, but then you look at the written text, including some of the subtitled text that is supposedly being spoken, and it looks like a bad Google translation.  I won’t speculate as to where the problem with this lies, I only hope that these companies will realize that something like this can take an otherwise beautiful game and really tarnish the overall package.  Beyond this flaw, Green Valley is a worthy addition to any casual gamer’s library.  With over 80 levels of fun, nice graphics and sound, and a fun story, it will definitely keep you digging for a while.

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(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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