December 8th, 2012

Astro Garden – First Look

So I went looking for new Facebook games to play when I got a little bored and this was one of the ones I came across.

This game is very similar to Frontierville when it was still around/a thing. Basically you start with a house and you have to build up from there, clearing the land and planting crops etc. Your goal is to build up an awesome place to live and or a town/city.

The story is that you were struck by lightening or something, it only shows you what’s happening and doesn’t explain too much, and you end up on this wacky different place with Exotic Eggplants and strange chickens and you have to build a lab to research hybrid weird crops and animals.
The intro to the game shows that you can be as great as THESE scientists.. Newton, Einstein and Da Vinci.. yup all male. No Curies, Lovelaces or any of them. Which.. I have no idea how they really factor into the game other than you are researching crops.

The game starts you off without any explanation and only an arrow pointing to a tree. You are expected to infer that you are to begin chopping the tree I guess. So there’s no real story dialogue going along with “Here chop this tree for <reason>.” Just.. click the tree and something will happen. It’s a basic point and click affair until you are done with the tree or rock and the items pop out for you to mouse over to collect. Same as it was in Frontierville and other city building style games.

As for the character creation, well for a while I thought that the only character you could play was some dude considering when you do some things a male voice tells you things like “Great!”, “Rare”!” and such. However I found the character creation which has a grand total of 4 per gender and only the default two genders. Two of the them are locked until after you are married. I guess you can do that in this game. Even the choices aren’t that great, it’s dude 1 or dude 2. The women is red pony tail or blond. Even the women get screwed over clothing-wise. They get the halter top and the shorts while the men get pants and t-shirt.

The music is good, and I enjoyed it a bit, the gameplay however is very short. You run out of energy very quickly and are left with nothing to do but exit and find something else other to do.

In the end it may be worth checking out if you are into that, but otherwise skippable.

Astro GardenBrowserCity BuilderFacebookFirst Look