Spring Valley: Family Farm Life Review

A Simple Family Plot

Spring Valley: Family Farm Life is a quiet, simple game that requires no stress or commitment from players while creating an environment with little complexity (and therefore, little plot) and a lot of vibrancy (and therefore, a lot of entertainment). Like most developers that caught on to the popularity of farming games such as Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing, Playkot saw an opportunity and took it. Playkot is probably better known for their recent success: Supercity. However, players can find two farming games by the developers in the Play Store. Currently, all Playkot’s games hold a 3.9 or higher for review ratings and have a high download count. So, since the company’s inception in 2009, they have figured out a strategy that works.

A Typical Family Plot

Spring Valley puts players through a tutorial of inheriting a rundown farm. The farm comes with a caretaker to play the uncle-figure leading players through quests and events. The option of making friends, and improving friendships, gives players that social feeling. And quests, in of themselves, are simple and require little to no resource grinding. The graphics are cute, clean and fun. The music is simple but not repetitive. The mechanics of growing crops and creating products to trade is straight forward with no hidden steps. And the dialogue (no audio) is clean of grammatical errors or typos. So, on the whole, Spring Valley hits a homerun for playability.

The Standard Family Plot

All that being said, Spring Valley: Family Farm Life is also a game that is easy to put down and forget about for days. And this is not Spring Valley’s only issue. The screen can be cluttered unless players are constantly rearranging. Energy can be slow to refill. Events come and go with very small windows of time. And the ads can be a bit much. Overall, these are not burdensome enough to not give Spring Valley a try. But they could very well be the reason players uninstall it after a while. It is not that the game is boring, but it is riding a wave of a million other games that came before it. And there is little to draw a player back unless they are really into harvesting potatoes and corn.