Farming isn't just about tending chickens and growing corn. Half the fun is showing off your products and earning decent cash for all your hard work! That's what you get to do in Farmers Market, where you sell your vegetables, dairy products and meats, as well as processed foods like burgers, roasted corn and fruit pies. Hire bands to keep your customers entertained, and create the best and most profitable marketplace in this fast-paced time management game!
Farmers Market is a unique time and resource management game that has managed to breathe new life into the time management game genre. Gameplay is similar to farm management games such as Farm Mania and the Farm Frenzy series, but this game deals with what happens after you've milked your cows and harvested your corn, when the goods get sent to market. No longer do the crops get sent off-screen in a truck and magically turn into money. Instead, your job here is to properly manage marketplaces to make sure the farmers turn a profit and everyone walks away happy.
The game will take you from region to region as you transform the many farmers markets around the country into thriving trading posts. Enjoy the scenery and the friendly townsfolk as you set up shop in various locations such as by the Mississippi river, in the scorching heat of the western plains, and by a rustic barn in the agricultural heartland. You will get to explore each area as you progress through the many levels of the game.
Each level in Farmers Market comes with a set of objectives you need to complete, and these objectives will quickly become more complex and difficult to achieve. These objectives include things like producing a certain amount of raw goods or processed foods, selling those foods, or earning a target amount of cash. These aren't too surprising, since you are running a money-making market, not an agricultural show!
So how do you achieve these objectives? In each marketplace, there are a number of plots which you can allocate to farmers and vendors. Once allocated, booths will be built and the farmer or vendor will start selling their foodstuff. There is a lot of dependency in making processed food for the vendors though. For example, if you want to sell hot dogs, you will obviously need a hot dog stand. But the hot dog stand will need meat from a butcher, and bread from a baker. And making the bread will require even more ingredients from the miller and the dairy booth!
As you can imagine, successfully completing each level's objectives will require proper strategy and planning. You will need to decide how many of each type of booth is required, and in what order you should build them (building booths costs money). In addition, booths need to be upgraded in order to produce rarer goods. A vegetable booth that initially sells corn can be upgraded to also produce corn oil or potatoes. Since french fries require both these ingredients, you will need 2 vegetable booths (each of which has received a different upgrade) plus the french fry booth in order to produce that artery-clogging snack.
Allocating booths is only half the game though. Farmers Market is a time management game after all, and this facet is present in the game in the form of workers. You start each level with a worker (and can hire more when you upgrade the office), and you send him around to basically do everything. Allocating a plot doesn't make a booth magically appear. A worker has to go build it. You also need workers to transport ingredients from the farmer booths to the vendor booths to get the food made.
However, making the food isn't going to make you money; you need customers! You'll have friendly townsfolk visiting your market and buying your available produce and food. You can also build special booths like bandstands to get a larger crowd coming to visit you. A large crowd creates more trash though, so you'll have to build enough trash cans and make sure the workers empty them regularly. Nobody wants to visit a dirty market! Many more of these elements are thrown in as you progress through the game.
Farmers Market is designed around pretty simple concepts, but the beautiful premise and huge variety of things that you can do in the game transforms it into a rich adventure with lots of replay value. All of this is also supported by crisp and colorful graphics as well as good music. Farmers Market will be a great game for you if you like farm management games such as Farm Mania or Farm Frenzy.
Rating: 4.5/5.0
You can read more about Farmers Market at
http://www.game-tycoon.com/farmers-market.html