Harvest Moon: Frantic Farming

This isn’t the first time the seemingly disparate worlds of farming and puzzling have come together. Puzzle De Harvest Moon tried to combine crop cultivation with ‘minigame madness,’ but came up short. Sadly, despite Frantic Farming revising the gameplay, it’s still convoluted.

Characters from the main Harvest games show up to battle each other across a vegetable-packed grid. It’s all about grabbing ripe veggies while watering others. There’s a tactical side to this, making sure you don’t run out of ripe produce and trying to chain together potatoes, tomatoes or whatever by sliding tiles around. It doesn’t have the pick-up-and-playness of Tetris or Bewjeled, but taking the time to master it isn’t rewarded enough by the limp Story mode. Harvest Moon should stick to the cow-tending.

Oct 5, 2009