Hey, it’s your friendly Kairosoft-reviewing-neighbor with yet another Kairosoft tile! This time we went, full-time farmer in Pocket Harvest. So gear up, fire up the engine, and let’s start harvesting.
Pocket Harvest:
Leave the rat race behind and reap the joys of life on your very own farm in Pocket Harvest! It’s time to cultivate crops with love, ranging from crisp lettuce to succulent strawberries, and refine them into prizewinning produce to bring orders from the local grocers flooding in. Adorable animal friends will lend a helping hoof, too, providing milk, wool, eggs, and more! It wouldn’t be a Kairosoft title if there weren’t some kind of … catch? In Pocket Harvest, you wear the overalls, so you call the shots! Grow your farm from the ground up into a flourishing cornucopia of fun! Which means more than manipulating crops and altering tastebuds. Remember those people who thought meat was produced in a factory? Well, Pocket Harvest has those as well. Boost your income and your image through tourism! From hot air balloons to sports facilities, you can build attractions in countless combinations to draw in high-spending city slickers.
Pocket Harvest brings a new dimension to the table since you’ll need to have actual knowledge about the annual growth of plants to make your farm work. Luckily you can grow your fruits and vegetables all year round when you unlock the greenhouse. Need a more moist ground to grow tomatoes? Invest in a well. Need more income? Strike a deal with the local juice vendor, which will sell a growing combination of fruity drinks to upstate tweens and businesses(wo)men who want to escape the cityscape. But since it’s a farm, you don’t have eternity to grow and sell your vegetables and fruit (and you can’t build unlimited greenhouses). The main goal of Pocket Harvest is to construct a logical layout, in which you combine as many fields as possible, with a maximum output to become the best farm of the state.
Challenges:
The challenges along the way are based on contests (fruit/vegetable) in which taste and looks declare you a total winner of a bad loser. The first few years are the hardest since all your stuff is graded as E (E <> A), which means you’ll have to invest and attract more knowledgeable employees. Invest logic points in cultivation, increase the yield, quality and taste, and before you know it, you’re a top-farmer, competing with the best of the best. But, like the other Kairosoft games, it takes a lot of elbow grease to get to this point. I had to restart a total of six times to find the pattern in which I could complete the harder challenges along the way. I rate this one as one of the harder Kairosoft games, which more harder underlying mechanics. It makes it harder to complete a single run and takes away a lot of the fun I had with the other titles.
So, to conclude – if you are in the market for everything that Kairosoft releases (like me), Pocket Harvest is a must-play. It’s a well-built simulator game and much less a cash grab than some of the older titles. I enjoyed it, even though it was a lot harder than some of my favorites. I did notice this along the line with some of the newer Kairosoft releases. They tend to be harder and more complex – while still offering a wide array of topics to tango with.
