FarmVille 2: The Farmening… Digital livestock strikes again.

Is he serious? Is he really reviewing FarmVille 2? Is there really a Farmville 2? The answer to all of these highly justified questions is ‘yes’. While many of us in the gaming community discuss the merits of recent releases like Borderlands 2 and Torchlight 2, the casual gaming scene on Facebook chugs silently along. To that end, FarmVille 2 made it’s debut on the social media giant back in September and quickly picked up steam the likes of which is rarely seen among retail gaming giants.

Social gaming?

I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t engaged in social games in the past. In fact, up until about a year or so ago, these little games really fit well into my schedule where bigger games like World of Warcraft just couldn’t. Now that I’m spending more time on more traditional games, I do tend to look down on most Facebook games. The issue that I tend to have with them is that anyone playing them is bound to annoy about 80% of their friends to no end with incessant requests to send whatever ridiculous item they need in order to build their super cyber-barn in Bovine Mafia Castle. Of course, that’s exactly what these games are designed to do; get people to drag their friends into the game and hope that somebody buys virtual items with real cash.

So why bother reviewing FarmVille 2 if I hold such disdain for the social game genre? Frankly, the number of people that do play these games is staggering. Appdata.com shows that FarmVille2 managed to hit 15.2 million monthly active users by the end of the month in which it was launched. That’s a lot of people tending to virtual farms. World of Warcraft peaked around 12 million subscriber and now has around 9.1 million. Of course, social games are free to play (unless you want the premium stuff offered for real money) and Warcraft requires a monthly subscription fee (after level 20 if you start a trial account). Of course, I did promise a review instead of just a rant about the state of gaming.

Tending to the digital herd

FarmVille 2 is the sequel to the highly successful and sometimes infamous Farmville. This new version features 3D modeled environments in which to nurture your virtual plants and livestock. It also features a bit of music during the loading screen that immediately brings to mind the Roger Miller classic, King of the Road. Of course, it offers many of the same features that made people obsessively continue to click on crops and animals that the original did such as goals (like quests, but with less running around and more clicking) and crafting. However, FarmVille 2 seems to be currently much smaller in scale both in the amount of things you can add to your farm as well as the actual size of the farm. This isn’t necessarily a drawback for me as I don’t particularly want to hunt over a large area for every little critter that needs harvesting. Also, no more “harvesting” critters with a large scythe icon. In this less sociopathic game, you simply feed your animals when they’re hungry and acquire whatever they happen to produce. Speaking of harvesting, a major advantage in FarmVille 2 over its predecessor is the ability to perform bulk tasks (like harvesting, planting, or watering) by clicking and dragging the cursor over all areas to be effected. No more clicking on every bloody crop, animal, and tree on the farm.

I’m betting that if I feed it, it will eat – it’s a chicken.

This, like many other social games, is a game that is ideal for people that have a limited window of gaming time during the day. While spending hours visiting the farms of your friends is certainly an option, the main actions that you can take on your own farm will be limited by the amount of water you have available. Water is a resource needed for growing plants and trees and the amount you’re allowed to accrue (equal to the number of  plots you have) during your journey into digital serfdom only regenerate one drop every 3 minutes unless you want to buy water packs. Essentially this lends itself to a scheduled approach to the game wherein you plant a variety of crops with different growth times in order to maximize your use of water and thus the amount of feed and money that you can produce. To really score big, be sure that when you’re close to leveling that you plant a lot of long term crops since all of your crops mature as soon as you level. Of course, you can further maximize your virtual profit by crafting the food you harvest into more complex items. So if you’re a big fan of crunching numbers, you can easily get your calculation on in FarmVille 2.

Reaping the social rewards

Of course, the core of this game is still that Zynga needs to get you to coerce your hapless friends into playing as well. So many tasks require getting friends to send you items you can otherwise only acquire by spending real money. Zynga also plans on you doing that as often as possible as well. I have no real issue with people gaming with their friends, in fact I would highly encourage it. However, social games tend to rely on gaming between friends being asynchronous and often inspiring people to add “friends” purely for the purposes of the game. I’m not really a big supporter of that. As a social game, FarmVille 2 does exactly what it should do. If anyone can actually tell me why this sort of game is so appealing to so many people, I would love to know.