Mr.Farmville

Earlier today, IGG.com (I Got Games) announced the launch of four new Facebook games: Crazy Clinic, Crazy Pirates, Perfect Poker Live, and Miracle Garden. Traditionally seated in free to play, massively multiplayer games – specifically the porting of Chinese ones to the rest of the world – the developer-publisher first experimented with Facebook back in October of last year with FishIsle. Now, IGG seeks to improve on past titles with these new releases. To see how they did, we took a closer look at the, currently, only English translated title on the list: Miracle Garden.

At its core, the new app is basically your typical farming-style game. However, this particular title appears more rooted in the concepts of aesthetic beauty, focusing on various forms of flora as opposed to fruits and vegetables. Nevertheless, the basics are still the same: Plow land, plant flower, water flower, harvest flower, sell flower. It’s all been seen before, but IGG does attempt to make up for it in a number of ways.

The first and most visible means stems from the actual artistic style. Everything has a very distinct style to it. The items are very cute looking and highly exaggerated with big heads, small bodies, stubby features, and an oversaturated color scheme. As odd as the combination sounds though, it actually looks pretty good.

Beyond surface value, Miracle Garden also has a nice means of creating guidance and goals through a simple quest system. Bit by bit, the game teaches you how to play (even though most users will already know how) by giving you small quests to accomplish. They’re all very simple, such as plant X number of Y plant, but each grant various rewards such as generous amounts of coins or items only purchasable with virtual currency.

Truthfully, it’s not an original feature, as we first saw it with Playfish’s farming app Country Story, but it is still a mechanic we don’t see very often in the farming genre. Most of the time, it’s simply a set of rules that are explained and the player does what they want; growing what they want. However, as subtle as it may seem, having the quests coaxes the player into doing very specific tasks that give them something to try and accomplish. Granted, these sandbox-like titles are about creating one’s own goals most of the time, but for those users that start one and go “What’s the point?” or “What am I supposed to do?” now there’s something spelled out for them.

It is worth pointing out, however, that this concept has proven itself to be a lucrative one in online games. Merely look at older massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Older MMORPGs such as Ultima Online, EverQuest, or Final Fantasy XI were created as worlds in which players could determine their own goals. Nonetheless, as popular as they were at times, the MMO genre did not truly take flight until Blizzard Entertainment decided to create goals and objectives with its World of Warcraft quest system – a system virtually everyone now copies.

Other than quests, the most significant element of Miracle Garden is its advertised “Miracle House.” According to the developer, players can actually cross-breed different plants to create “tens of thousands” of different types of flora; a similar concept to what we saw in Tall Tree Games’ Garden World. Upon doing so, users can plant the seed and wait a day until it blooms to see what it is, or they can use an item that costs virtual currency – dubbed a “Plant Identifier” – to identify it right away.

These can then be gifted to your friends as well, or visa versa, to create even more combinations. Moreover, after you’ve planted so many different types of flowers, you can also purchase new species within the game’s store as well. Unfortunately, the game isn’t exactly clear on what these requirements specifically are, and we have yet to unlock any.

Interestingly enough, the use of your friends to discover new types of flowers appears to be rather important, as users are only granted a limited amount of space within what is called the “Nursery.” Acting like an in-game store, but for just plants, the Nursery contains all of your flowers available for growing, including the ones you discover. Eventually, this requires players to pick and choose what they want to be able grow in the future. Of course, this can always be expanded for a sizable amount of in-game currency of a paltry amount of virtual currency.

In fact, there are a lot of little things players can purchase using Miracle Garden’s virtual currency (just called “Cash”). Some of it is basic, such as food that can replenish user stamina that is consumed by performing actions; even though this hardly ever runs low. Other purchases, however, are a bit more interesting and include means to improve the chances of flower mutation upon breading, reviving dead plants, and even joining a “VIP” club for a limited time that gives you improved gardening tools and faster stamina recovery.

On the down side of things, the biggest issue for players comes early on with the sheer cost of decorations. In the beginning, it is a bit tough to make money and some of the décor is extremely expensive. Moreover, a lot of the flowers you breed are gated by level, effectively locking you out of one of the central mechanics until you earn that level. Granted, it’s not a huge deal, but it is a bit annoying when you wait a day to get a new species and then can’t use it.

Nonetheless, Miracle Garden is still a nice addition to the farming-style genre. It’s certainly well made, and has a wonderful visual style that will appeal to a wide variety of users. Unfortunately, as a farming type of game, it’s main concept is a bit of a tired one, but it is able to make up for it slightly with the quest system and the users’ capability to create their own flowers. Overall, it’s a pretty worthwhile app, but how it will do amongst the sea of others of its ilk is still yet to be determined.

Source: Inside Social Games