Video Game Review: The FarmVille 2 Video Game Is Released

Played in 10-minute doses, the game promised inevitable progress and threatened minimal failure. FarmVille players could not lose; they just needed more time to do better. The fuel for progress was anxiety, the concern that your friends were doing better because they had clicked, paid or pestered others for help more often.

Three years later we have FarmVille 2: a slicker, more attractive version of the old way of doing things. It still mimics a chain letter, though at its core it runs a more complex interactive simulation of crops and harvests that requires increased decision-making from the player. So it feels more like a valid game.

This big sequel arrives as its creators at Zynga are facing pressure over the company’s performance and concerns about whether people have tired of social gaming’s basic tricks.

FarmVille 2, like its predecessor, lets players log in free, most likely through Facebook, to begin tilling a plot of land. Players can click on squares to plant seeds for tomatoes, blueberries and other crops. One click to plant. One click to water. Then a timer reveals the number of minutes, hours or, eventually, days it will take for that crop to grow into a lucrative harvest. Seeds cost virtual money, as do animals that can be fed to produce eggs, wool, milk and other goods that can be sold back for more virtual money.

As players manage this cycle, they accrue experience points, which gradually earn them the equivalent of a promotion. That gives them access to more exotic crops and animals and some new goals, to plant five of this thing or sell four of that. In this new game players can also combine produce to cook pies and other valuable goods, which can be sold for virtual money that can be reinvested. On and on it goes.

Sessions with the game are brief. After about 10 minutes of tinkering, a player will have used all the water and will have to wait for more to well up, drop by drop. Of course, you can always ask friends for more water or pay for it.

The smart player rations water, plants the most profitable crops and plans the harvests to produce the ingredients that will combine into the most profitable recipes. The masterly math of the new game rewards the patient player who figures out the timing trick that causes every patch of land and every tree in the orchard to sprout its bounty simultaneously. This is a game, though it could be mistaken for an advanced class in plate-spinning or the management of a factory of robots.

On a FarmVille farm each effort receives a reward. Click on a chicken, and it will drop an egg. This has an advantage over real life, but only to those who don’t value the serendipity of a surprising success or defeat. There are no flash floods that obliterate the harvest in FarmVille 2, no engineering breakthroughs that produce a better tractor. Farmers here need not worry about the cancellation of government subsidies.

The true game, however, isn’t really the farming. The farming is the delivery system for two more interesting meta-games.

The first pits players against the people who made it. This ostensibly free game is perpetually cajoling players to pay real money to speed their progress. For a few dollars a player can accelerate the growth of crops or buy the next sheep or barn or decorative garden gnome.

This puts players at odds with the game’s creators, which isn’t unusual for, say, a player of Super Mario Bros. or Call of Duty, who might curse the designers for putting a treacherous pit or a vexing enemy in their path.

But with FarmVille 2, the enemy creator is more like a customs agent who speeds things along if slipped a few bucks. You don’t pay money to FarmVille 2 for the privilege of playing, as you would with a $60 PlayStation game. You are also not taxed a quarter at a time for not being skilled enough, in the manner of old arcade games. No, you pay to make life easier. Avoiding that, improving your farm without paying, feels like delicious defiance.

The second of FarmVille 2’s captivating contests is the battle with friends. Played alone, FarmVille 2 will become a bore, but the series’s maligned interweaving of Facebook friends produces prime opportunity for peacocking and lawn comparing. Each screen shot that a taunting friend sends of a sunflower-filled master pasture stings. It takes one glance at the work of friends who have played FarmVille 2 longer or better to transform the most rudimentary virtual farming activities into manic endeavors to get your grass greener. Falling for this stuff means falling for the very manipulations of anxiety and shame that are easy to criticize when they’re not happening to you. When you’re invested in them as a player, however, they’re a thrill.

Facebook games like FarmVille 2 retain the stench of a casino. But where the first game’s systems were too shallow, the new one’s are just deep enough to convey the feeling that smarts can move a player forward as effectively as the passage of time. That this game is constantly pestering for payment is all the more welcome. Every good system invites rebellion. Just try to have fun without paying a cent, the game seemingly whispers. Challenge answered.

This is a game that is as enjoyable to play as it is to defy.

Stephen Totilo is the editor in chief of the gaming Web site kotaku.com.