No, this is not my farm and I don't want to have anything to do with this.
My Farm on the Wii U eShop is the latest in a long laundry list of titles that was released on the past few Nintendo systems by BiP Media. The games were respectable at best and quite boring at worst. This newest version pitches itself as a unique experience for the Wii U eShop, but honestly becomes boring at a rapid rate and ultimately becomes a completely forgettable ride.
Players step into the shoes of a new farmer, who left the irritating city and decided to start a new life altogether. The game starts simple with only a hen, 100 coins, and some grain to feed said animal. My Farm's concept has some merit as you have to feed and clean animals, collect natural resources, and expand your farm. And at first, these elements seem totally inoffensive though quite simple.
However, reality kicks in quick as players are constantly forced to do the same monotonous tasks day in and out. All these management tasks are done on the touchscreen of the Wii U GamePad, but you barely feel like you are in control of the place. As you care for the same static animals, you barely get any reactions out of them on the actual TV screen. They will just walk about and ignore the player almost entirely. You can sell items the animal give you to buy more animals, food, or things to enrich the animals’ life. In reality, the player will need to buy these structures to allow for more critters on the farm and this means you have to complete the same boring tasks with even more animals.
Between some simple cleaning of the farm and feeding your new animal buddies, there is pretty much nothing to do at your new place. You can move the camera about and see what the animals are doing with the control sticks, but they are mostly sleeping or walking about. Players can switch to a 32x time rate to skip right back to their boring tasks, which get more annoying by the minute.
My Farm doesn't look that great either. While the menus are well represented, the actual occurrences on the game screen don't look that impressive. The textures look somewhat muddy and don't do much to really stand out. More hilarious is how little animation there is, made even more noticeable when I built the pond for the ducks. The ducks don't swim, but instead walk on the pond. The background noise and sound effects are alright, but once again not much variety sadly.
My Farm really tries its best, but the experience is not very fun to play. The controls are fine and the gameplay elements are well introduced, but everything else feels monotonous. There is simply no real connection with these animals or what you are doing on the touchscreen. It all becomes boring way too soon before you made any sort of actual progress and that is the crime this game committed.