This is a pretty standard build-your-village type of game. You unlock new buildings/resources/areas to explore as you level. You can trade items with other players (although not directly, you have to hope someone wants what you are selling or is selling what you are looking for). It does a good job of keeping you busy while giving you breaks while things are in cool downs.Unfortunately, it can sometimes lock you out of advancing for a while through no fault of the player. There are certain resources (magical charms) that can only be gotten randomly (as a loot drop from monster fights, in the gambling house, or as a random chance from the gnome or feeding animals). These resources are necessary for things like increasing your inventory space (absolutely necessary in order to build things as you level), unlocking new areas, or even chopping down huge trees that are positioned to make it hard to build around. There is no way for the player to guarantee these resources, except of course spending money on the game. It can be incredibly frustrating when, for example, the gnome gives you 7 axes (and your weapon inventory can only hold 10 items), preventing you from even making the items you need because you no longer have the space for them as you pray for the red charm to randomly drop so you can increase said inventory space.

Dear game makers,Why do you hate the players who spend hours on your game? Why do you punish players for reaching higher levels? The further you get in the game, the less rewards you get, the less discounts you get for the money you do spend. You literally get to 5X less jewels for your money. For example, you spend 9.99 and you get about 2k jewels. Well you need nearly a thousand jewels for one building upgrade, and you need five or more upgrades to produce a product that requires ANOTHER product from a building that needs five plus upgrades to produce! I loved this game, but the longer I play it the more I resent the game makers and regret the 200 or so dollars I’ve spent already. This is the most expensive free game you will ever play. Oh and I forgot to mention, the buildings it costs hours and hours for actual weeks to build, they are nearly never on fire, attacks from the increasing number of monsters you encounter when you advance. How many jewels does it cost to rid them? Nearly 400. How long before another attack? A few minutes. They are constantly, without exaggeration, always on fire. If you want to play the game, you have to pay. And you have to pay A LOT. After weeks of game play, you reach another level. And that only means you have to spend more to keep playing. The higher you advance, (I’m at 88) each level unlocks a decoration. And how much do these new decorations costs? Thousands of jewels. How much do you get for three ads you watch? 10. 10 jewels.

It’s a fun little game up until you start having to constantly fight the limited inventory space and deal with construction and manufacturing times that range from 2 minutes to several days. This wouldn’t in itself be a problem if not for how quickly the manufacturing times increase. The “level 1” manufacturable wood item (called “wood”) takes only 2 minutes to make. The “level 2” wood item “hard wood” takes an hour. I am not even very far into the game, but I wouldn’t be surprised if charcoal takes 24 hours to manufacture. Meanwhile, the first big monster that you have to fight to open up the second area takes an hour or so to fight, but the next big monster actually takes 24 hours to fight. And you need at least 1 spear, 1 club, and 2 shields, all of which get used up very quickly when giant scorpions start attacking your farms. It also takes several types of treasures, each of which is needed to expand your various inventories which, again, you’re constantly struggling to manage. And in order to get around any of this, there are some really high gem costs, clearly designed to make you run out of any gems the game gives you very quickly so that you then have to buy more just to do anything in the game. Of course, it’s not the worst money grab I’ve ever seen, and it is still an okay game, so I won’t give it 1 star, but the time scaling and resource requirements really need to be adjusted to be more reasonable.

Broken - I’m 40/86 achievements so tried hard to give it time to fix itself. By level 17, you have enough stuff to pass lvl 3 - ??? Could easily be caught up, for a cool $$$ 4-6 thousand (6000). That’s what it would cost me to have everything current. Thats a bit ridiculous considering how much down time there is. Out of all the similar games that I have played, harvest lands seem to be the one that requires the most money to make progress. Items that take a week to earn one for free are required in numbers as high as 7 to make advancements or improvements. Considering there is often several of these items required to make progress in a particular area, you are left with the game asking you to complete tasks with items from level 20 while you’re only at level 10. By the time you get to 20, they are now asking for level 30 items - it just seems set up to make you continually purchase a myriad of items to complete every even minute task. I think giving it multiple months was more than fair as I hoped it would balance out at some point but there are at least 5 better options for similar apps that while may have purchases help to advance oneself, they are nowhere needs as frequent or necessary as Harvest land requires. Skip it as plenty of options out there that are similar, better and ask for mere pennies on the dollar relative to this one. I think maybe they got their math wrong as if everything was 1/100 th the price, could be moving right along and would have paying customers. Oh well, must be nice to be a rich kid and not care about investors money.