Today's game was originally given away 29th July 2017 HERE. where it received a positive 85% from 27 votes.

Green Valley: Fun on the Farm

In Brief

Green Valley: Fun on the Farm is a farming oriented match three game with a simple cartoon like upgradeable farm building simulation with lots of bonuses.

Introduction:

Turn Uncle Billy Bug`s fallow farm into a prodigious plantation! Select produce in meandering rows of three or more to box them up and send them to market. Build rows through special items to score big bonuses and shear a few sheep for some extra cash. The pastoral party never ends matching produce down on Beetle Bug's family farm!

Reference accessed HERE 23rd May 2020

If you have a problem installing or activating or getting Green Valley: Fun on the Farm to work please visit the problems section HERE

The Game:

Normally, insects can present huge problems for farms, ruining crops, infecting cattle with disease and spreading blight throughout the land. In googly-eyed hero Beetle Bug’s latest adventure, Green Valley – Fun on the Farm, though, they’re actually in charge of turning an ailing estate and its fallow fields into a thriving concern.

A pleasing match-three mind-bender that’s blessed with brilliant audiovisuals and myriad challenge types, from a pure value standpoint, the game proves a solid, if not banner harvest. As such, while well above average in terms of overall quality, it’s nonetheless a little rough around the edges for the – and we quote the developers here – “most agricultural puzzle game of all times [sic]!”

If marketing copy like that isn’t a dead giveaway, one of the title’s most obvious and immediately annoying gaffes is its Pidgin English translation. It’s a shame too, as from the second you boot up the game’s animated intro sequence, complete with catchy voice-overs by our bumbling hero and his quirky kids, the presentation’s otherwise top-notch.

Brightly colored, flush with personality and featuring regular cut-scenes with lively speech samples that appear between new scenarios, we can’t help but wonder how this annoyance was overlooked. That goes double when you consider that spoken dialogue doesn’t always match on-screen subtitles to boot, tainting one’s initial impression – strange stuff, indeed.

Thankfully for perplexed viewers, the actual hands-on action itself more than makes up for such shortcomings, offering a variety of challenges to tackle. Most stages take the form of grids of hexagonal tiles, and are themed after fields, fruit trees and soil beds. By dragging the mouse over adjacent sequences of playing pieces containing icons for strawberries, flowers, eggplants, peas and onions (among other objects), you’ll attempt to make groups of three or more identical items. Do so, and they disappear from the board, with fruits and vegetables tumbling downwards to either splatter uselessly against the ground or collect in waiting boxes, which Beetle Bug then harvests and turns into cash.

Earn enough money, and you’ll literally watch your farm – initially an old cottage – grow to encompass orchards, cattle pens and rolling grasslands. (Thank mid-mission interludes where you can admire surrounding grounds and click on flying birds to pop them for extra loot.)

But where the game really shines is in how it continually mixes things up over a sequence of 80 individual levels. For example, goals can shift. Rather than collecting X number of foodstuffs in a set amount of time, one stage might demand you remove stones from fields by pushing them to the bottom of the grid, while the next requires releasing a certain number of chickens from their eggs instead. Likewise, creating larger matches can cause bonuses to appear, letting you destroy nearby tiles with explosive force or remove entire lines from the play field at a time.

An increasingly more diverse range of obstacles such as ice and blocked-off tiles that’s introduced as you advance also presents difficulties. Furthermore, one can additionally charge mega bonuses that let you remove random tiles and add extra crates on-demand. There’s even the odd mini-game to savor.

Collectively, the experience proves brisk, beautiful and engaging, ultimately adding up to way more than the sum of its parts. But the hard truth is that there’s little here in the way of innovation or surprises; just a clever, and well-refined, mise-mash of common tropes. Keeping this in mind, Green Valley nonetheless proves an impressive repackaging of genre staples that’s sure to satisfy most comers. Take away the slick window dressing, however, and you’ll find that, as with the various vittles it features, there’s still plenty of room for growth.

Edited reference accessed HERE. Original review written by Scott Steinberg on Oct 15, 2008; originally re-posted by Whiterabbit-uk 28th July 2017 then again 23rd May 2020

Other Reviews & Videos of Green Valley: Fun on the Farm:

You can see Big Fish community reviews of Green Valley: Fun on the Farm HERE and more information in the Big Fish forums HERE.

You can see some videos of game play HERE, HERE (Russian), HERE, HERE and HERE.

Conclusion:

Good animated visuals, goofy voice-overs and decent Sound effects and music. The setup is charming and there are loads of bonuses and obstacles with masses of goal types. Attention to detail is excellent though some of the translations are a little suspect.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank MyPlayCity for giving away Green Valley: Fun on the Farm and also to the game giveaway team, as always, for securing other ways to get free games.

Useful Information not related to today's game giveaway:

Don't forget to check out the Epic Game store for the latest freebies HERE. The latest game is the base game for Sid Meir's Civilization VI

Also check out Reddit's Free Games on Steam (These may fluctuate over the week, so it's worth checking daily because there have been quite a few developers offering their commercial games for free during the lock-down - if you see a game, just open your Steam client and search for the game in the store; if it's still available free you'll see that they are 100% off, (though some of the giveaways are via other sites like Alienware; though I advise not following any links to the givekey.ru site as I believe it is a scam site. Read the comments for each giveaway and you'll see the genuine ones. Those with a Steam url, just require you to visit the appropriate store page via your Steam client and you should find the green buy button says 100% off, if it doesn't, it means the giveaway is over. The site is updated frequently, so if a game is no longer available it's usually tagged with an 'Over' icon. Hurry though because these free games don't stay free long. Once added to your account they become permanently attached.

You can also get loads of free DRM free games from Indie Gala and HERE. They have recently added a few more games that look worthwhile, including Construct: Escape the System, Doodle Devil, Airport Madness World Edition, Naval Warfare, Lovely Planet, Dreamscapes: The Sandman: Premium Edition, Waste Walkers Subsistence plus loads more. Most are windows versions, but you'll find some also include Mac versions

Finally check Delenns threads for other freebies both Steam and Non Steam titles HERE and HERE. You'll find links to a Witcher card game plus The Witcher Enhanced Edition from GOG as well as the latest pre alpha version of Unreal Tournament (similar graphics to Unreal Tournament 3).

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