There are hundreds of applications on Facebook that let you send flowers and gifts to your friends on special occasions. (I should know, I’ve blocked my fair share of them!) I-play’s Bloom Town, though, takes the idea of “gifting” and turns it into something a lot more special since you grow the flowers yourself on your very own virtual farm.
There are hundreds of applications on Facebook that let you send flowers and gifts to your friends on special occasions. (I should know, I’ve blocked my fair share of them!) I-play’s Bloom Town, though, takes the idea of “gifting” and turns it into something a lot more special since you grow the flowers yourself on your very own virtual farm.
The premise of Bloom Town, which launched a couple of days ago, couldn’t simpler: plow and plant seeds on your little plot of land, harvest the flowers when they bloom, and use them to create bouquets which you can send to any of your friends on Facebook whether they’ve added the application or not.
For the time being, creating a bouquet is as simple as choosing the lucky recipient from your list of friends, selecting a type of flower from the shed (where all your flowers are stored after harvesting), choosing what type of vase you’d like, then clicking Send to wrap them up in a virtual box and send them on their way to appear as a notification on your friend’s wall. Soon you’ll apparently be able to add bows and balloons as well. You can send flowers for a specific occasion, like birthday or get well, or “just because.”
The game has launched with a basic set of items in the shop that you can use to expand your little farm. You can buy additional seed types, upgrade your shed and house, and buy decorations like fences and decorative stones. There are animals too, but since the first ones (a fluffy white rabbit and a black bat) don’t get unlocked until level 18, we can’t actually tell you what – if anything – they actually do or produce.
The fact that you can’t unlock an animal until level 18 seems a bit heavy-handed, especially since you seem to progress through the levels at a slower pace than some other games. The pricing is a bit strange too; certain vase colors are free or very cheap, while others have inexplicably exorbitant price tags. 2,000 coins for a yellow vase? Really? What’s so special about the color yellow??
On the positive side, an easy drag-and-drop interface makes it very simple to customize and reorganize everything on the farm. And although plants do wilt eventually, you get a day’s grace before they do. Checking in on your plants once a day seems more reasonable than random minute or hour intervals.
Bloom Town is still in early beta, and you can rest-assured that the game will be changing and growing a lot in the upcoming weeks and months. Be sure to add a Gamezebo game alert if you’d like to receive updates about this game.
