Farmville Review

They say that you should never mess with success, and social network gaming guru Zynga hasn't. Their newly released Farmville app for iPhone is an accurate translation of their famous (some might say infamous)

Facebook app, almost perfectly recreating Farmville in look, feel, and function. There are no new features, no new bells and whistles. This is Farmville lifted out of your Facebook account and put into your iPhone.

Well, not quite. The iPhone app is more limited than the Facebook app. Instead, it's an extension of your Facebook account (what they refer to as "Web Farmville" in the Help and FAQ sections). With iPhone Farmville, you can engage in the whole crop cycle (plow, plant, harvest) and you can buy, place and move anything from the Market. However, you can't do anything with your Farmville avatar, for example; the little cartoon farmer is completely MIA. And there are certain elements, like collections and building materials, which can be used Web-only. In other words, Zynga doesn’t want you to abandon Web Farmville in favor of your iPhone.

The whole thing is faithfully reconstructed. It looks, sounds, and feels exactly like Web Farmville. Zynga has even translated the touch controls to function as close to the Facebook version as they possibly could. In fact, there are things I hate about the web controls that I

wish they had taken the chance to address here, like the inability to plow or harvest multiple plots at once. Nope; you still have to touch each plot, one at a time, either tapping or sliding your finger across them. This is Farmville, unadulterated but also unimproved.

In the end, it's not a game but a task manager; you don't play the Farmville app so much as you make it part of your workflow. Which makes sense, since Farmville and its ilk aren't games in the traditional sense. The main purpose is to let you tend to your time-sensitive crops and other in-game tasks when you're away from the desktop, which, If you're into Farmville, is probably just what you need to stay connected to your virtual farm.