Miracle Garden Review
There's no shortage of FarmVille clones on Facebook. After awhile, they begin to run together. Miracle Garden is no FarmVille clone, however, for all that it's a farming sim.
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My Empire Review
My Empire is half city-building social game (think Social City) and half Sid Meier's Civilization. It's the lighter half of Civ, with no real competitive elements and no emphasis on combat. It's the part of Civ that's about watching timers tick away, your fictional civilization's population growing and your territories slowly expanding.
Funfari Review
Funfari is one of those "new visuals, old gameplay" types of game. It's essentially a jungle skin wrapped over your typical post-FarmVille farm sim. The only safari-like touch is that you can keep exotic animals on your jungle plantation and earn money for taking care of them. While Funfari's graphics are very attractive, the game doesn't offer enough to hold a player's interest for long right now. There's not a lot to do and what is available quickly becomes very repetitive, even by the standards of the farm sim genre.
Jungle Life Review
You might reasonably expect a game like Jungle Life to offer a very different spin on the virtual pet genre, since it's a game about raising and breeding exotic African animals. You would, in this case, be entirely disappointed. Jungle Life is primarily an exercise in putting a brightly-colored safari skin over the basic formula of the fish care game. You can mate crocodiles instead of goldfish and decorate a patch of jungle instead of a tank, but those are the main substantial differences.
Nightclub City Review
The most impressive thing about Nightclub City, at first glance, is that it is not recognizably a clone of anything. A lot of its features aren't too uncommon for social games (with one exception), Nightclub City packages them together in an entirely new way. As the name implies, Nightclub City is a game about running a virtual nightclub that's got the potential to become much deeper than most of its Facebook competitors. As you improve your club's luxury and popularity levels, you'll begin attracting more lucrative types of customers.
Backyard Monsters Review
Facebook games thrive on the simplest gameplay conceits. Most of Zynga's oeuvre amounts to clicking tiles. Text RPGs are simple stat-raising exercises. Action games usually involve repeating a single, often silly, action. A game like Backyard Monsters seems completely anomalous in this environment, offering a blend of grand strategy and monster breeding. You can be attacked by wild monsters or, once you've reached a certain point, other players. You can also attack other players yourself. That's a pretty far cry from Café World.
Fantasy Kingdoms Review
A change of genre can do a lot for gameplay that, deep down, is nothing more than an iteration of a familiar fomula. This is certainly the case with Fantasy Kingdoms, a game that can be fairly described as FarmVille crashing headlong into Harry Potter. You are a witch or warlock that grows magical crops and trees in order to harvest mana, which you can use to buy decorations (and better crops) for your magical farm.
Birdland Review
Social gaming is so clone-happy at the moment that even seeing a new motif applied to a familiar genre can be refreshing. Birdland plays identically to your average aquarium sim, but you raise cute birds in an expansive cage instead of dainty fish in a fantasy tank. I get the feeling Zynga is going to be watching this game's growth very closely over the next few months, to see if it needs to go register a trademark for BirdVille.
