As someone who spends most their week in mobile games, I felt like writing a review on Fantasy Town by Gameloft. My thoughts on what  they did well and what they could improve on. Please be advised that no one has asked me to write a review, these are just my own personal thoughts. At the end, I  hope you go and try out the game!

Artwork
Beautiful 3D art with cute fairies, elves and the like. Their little houses are lovely and have a lot of detail. Even some of the signs on the buildings are animated, along with lighting and random little things. I am drawn to detail and it’s nice to play a mobile game that has a lot of it. The play space is also pretty with the tiny waterfall and stream running through the town.

 

Game Design
Some of it is a little quirky. If you have bought a building before a goal for that building comes up, you have a goal waiting for you until  you again buy another building, or eliminate the goal by paying rubies. Just a way they try to make money, but again annoying. Energy or “Potions” is a little sparse. You can only get so much before you have to go and actually purchase potions with rubies. Coins,  you can actually collect quit a bit of money without having to purchase anything. Creating fields, growing fruit, vegetables and flowers is another nice way to make  money and get items for your collections. Surprisingly, expansions are not that expensive for coins. But the higher up  you go, the more expensive they become.

User Experience
It’s a little clunky, I feel that the UI was more thrown together and copied by Zynga then trying to be innovative. Also, the tabs in “My Stuff” are messy and way too close. They recently added a new Avatar feature which cluttered it even more. I am not a huge fan of tabs and feel they are never done well, but for same designers I guess its a necessary evil.  The one big no, no I have found is that Gameloft flipped the UI to the top of the screen on the iPad. Say what? That is as huge inconsistancy for users that also play on the iPhone/Android devices. Not only are the sliding context menus annoying, who would put them at the top of the screen? A user does not hold their iPad by their pinkies. Thumbs people, it’s the thumbs!  I can understand trying to save HUD real estate, but you lose just the same amount if it was put at the bottom and it would have been easier to play and consistant. This is an ultimatum for me and I don’t play it on the iPad anymore. I do like how you can change the name of your town anytime, the changing of avatars and also that quests don’t take up a lot of the HUD.

 

User Interface
Pretty blue/teal color and thats about it, sadly. I am a harsh critique when it comes to pretty game UI. I feel like it’s a field that needs to be polished and can look amazing. It’s one of my main missions in mobile UI game design. A lot of the UI/UX in fantasy town is not up to par with that I would call good UI. Call to action buttons are green which is great and the icons are very pretty (The artistic ones). Other than that, I feel like there is a mass increase in black drop shadows, and non crisp shapes. I also feel like it doesn’t look like the art, or match it closely. It’s okay for the game UI  to look similar to the art. It just has to be done tastefully and with not a lot of clutter. The buttons also look odd to me, with multiple layers, and no depth. Just drop shadows. Obvious buttons are important, without them users may get lost and also uneasy in playing the game. UI is about building trust with users, if  someone fails at that, you’ve failed at making a successful game.

 

Overall, a very pretty game with cute houses, fairies, princesses, princes and elves. It’s certainly a content driven game. The UX and UI is nothing to get excited about and the overall game play is pretty easy, even for a non payer. You can get far in the game without paying a lot which is a nice plus. Although I totally forget what the storyline is or the goal of the entire game. Probably just to grow your town and collect items. I wish there was more of a storyline.

I am going to give this game 3 stars. For beautiful art and being able to play far in the game without purchasing premium currency and potions for energy.
I know there is a lot more I could talk about here, but I don’t want this to be an exhausting post. If you have any questions or comments please leave them below. I love opening up room for conversation and opinons.

Demographic: Woman, tweens to late 20’s