Astro Ranch (iPhone)

A small, Harvest Moon style farming game, that’s unfortunately been released in an appallingly unfinished state.

There are crashes aplenty, a terrible lack of feedback when player actions fail and the social networking part of the game simply doesn’t work right now.

An example. I started the game, went through the tutorial, then spent all my money on seeds. I spent a good twenty minutes trying to dig the ground so I could plant the seeds, but it wouldn’t work. I used my shovel, my character walked over to the square I’d chosen, then did nothing. There was absolutely no explanation of why it wouldn’t work, but I eventually found out online that you need to pay to dig squares and I had no money. A little pop up explaining the problem would have saved me an awful lot frustration – and when a game loses that amount of goodwill so early, it’s hard to get back. (It does tell you that it costs money to dig land in some text help you can find in your house, but it was in the Crops sections, which I didn’t check, rather than the Basics section, which is where it tells you how to use your tools.)

Give him cannonballs. Hope game doesn't crash.

Another example. There’s a chap who wants you to find three cannonballs. I wandered around the tiny game world, found the balls, then took them to him. I gave the balls to him… and the game crashed. I went back in (the game had saved the previous day, so I didn’t have to repeat too much), then tried again. This time when I gave him the balls, the guy told me to go find the balls, then immediately thanked me for bringing the balls to him.

There are other niggles, such as path-finding bugs that send your character in the opposite direction to where you want to go. The controls need work too, as sometimes you need to be annoyingly precise about exactly where you position your character and I really don’t like having to tap the screen to move. It’s all right when moving down the screen, but when going up the screen my finger gets in the way. I don’t like having to shake my iPhone to shake trees, either.

All a bit flakey and unfinished, in other words. Luckily I’ve not yet hit any bugs that stop my game from loading, as others have reported online.

There's decent farming underneath it all.

Once it’s all fixed, there’s going to be a good game here, but I don’t think it’ll ever rival Harvest Moon. I’m not a fan of the sci-fi setting, as having made-up names for vegetables and animals makes everything less intuitive, and the game world is surprisingly small, but there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the game design.

After a few updates this might be worth getting, but until its been fixed and tweaked it’s impossible to recommend.