Feb 8, 20177 min read

Testing the soil in Gardenscapes: New Acres

OVERVIEW

Game: Gardenscapes: New Acres
Genre: Match-3 & Simulation
Developer: Playtrix
Rating: 4.5 / 5

QUICK REVIEW

Gardenscapes: New Acres is a fresh take on the match-3 game. The integration of the garden repair gameplay and the attention to story gives it a nice personal touch that gets the player invested and sets it apart from the hoards of match-3 games out there. Though the social features could do a better job of integrating real life friends and the economy feels a bit imbalanced, which may affect long-term monetization, I believe it’s a solid game that’s here to stay

Full review follows below

ONBOARDING

The Good

Really great story elements during onboarding. The game asks you for your name so the butler, Austin, can use it when he talks. It does feel personal and gets you invested in the story
The gameplay tutorials are simple and straightforward

The Bad

Asset downloading! For me, asset downloading is the onboarding killer. So many things can go wrong. Slow internet, downloading error, not enough space on device. I understand that build size is an issue as well, but download as few assets as possible during to get things moving along. A lot of resources were downloaded here during onboarding.
Overall it’s just too long before I can start playing. The cut scene is a bit too long (it’s skippable though so that’s good). In addition to the cut scene there’s another dialogue scene that’s a bit long as well. It isn’t until 3 minutes from install that I can actually start playing the game.

FIRST SESSION

The Good

Great sense of accomplishment. Since the game uses the heart mechanic (as opposed to energy mechanic) you can blaze through the easy starter levels and get a lot of gameplay in session 1.
You can complete multiple tasks and even finish a 1 day cycle in the game world.
The game also has a continuous story, so it sets up some things that I can look forward to in future sessions.
Again, all the gameplay tutorials are simple and don’t interfere with game flow

The Bad

Not much. I had a pretty good first session

GAMEPLAY

GAME MODES

Match-3 main gameplay
- Play match 3 levels with varying goals to earn stars and coins
Garden Repair Simulation
- Repair various areas around the garden with help from NPCs
- Finish repairing an area for rewards and to progress through the game

BASIC GAMEFLOW

The gameflow is really simple. Play the match-3 gameplay, earn stars, use stars to complete tasks. The game even has a real handy flowchart to show this.

Strengths:

Story story story!
- The story is really what sets apart this game from the mountain of match-3 games out there. There is an equal emphasis given to the garden repair gameplay and the match-3 gameplay so that it doesn’t just feel like a tacked on thing. The story elements really helped me get invested in the game. I’ll go into depth on specifics
- Personalized / Non-Generic / Timely Comments
  - Austin, your butler, who is basically your guide through the game talks to you in between levels or while you’re idling around the garden. His comments are non-generic and make sense in situations. When I enter the game, he greets me. When I fail a level by a little, he comments on how close I was to winning. When I crush a hard level, he commends me. It is a pretty minor thing, but it honestly really helps you feel like the game is personalized to you. It’s the type of thing that keeps a player coming back.
- The dog storyline
  - Now this was just tailor made for me. I’m a dog person to my core so I’m not sure how cat lovers will feel about this one. The fact that you can name your dog (I named him, Bugsy, which is the name of my dog in real life) and there are dog related tasks was a huge pro for me. While this obviously doesn’t apply to everyone, it’s just an example of the sort of thing a game like this can do hook players. I suppose the ideal thing to do would be to let players choose a pet though that may be more trouble than it’s worth
- Neighbourhood / Friends
  - Austin is not the only character you interact with. There is literally a whole neighbourhood of NPCs who you come across from the plumber, to the librarian, to your neighbour down the road. It creates a nice sense of community as you work together with these people and encounter them in random game events.
Variety of match-3 game modes
- Match-3 is a crazy saturated genre, but I do appreciate that Gardenscapes has some cool new game goals. One such goal is a task where you need to make matches beside flower plots in order to grow flowers then collect the flowers.
No replays
- Another way it’s distinct from all the match-3 saga games is it doesn’t have a road map where you can see all the levels. You just play one level at a time. I guess some people may see this as a con since you can’t replay fun levels, but for me it does help the player just focus on the level at hand with the goal of just finishing the level to get the star and complete the repair task.
Offline play
- A rarity nowadays, but always a welcome one from me. I understand that not a lot of games do it because you can cheat the clock (This is why we can’t have nice things, cheaters), but I think it helps increase sessions since players can play whenever they want without worrying about internet connection or data usage (and I can play on planes :D)
Freedom of play
- You can choose which tasks you want to do first. You can customize your decoration to a certain extent. And technically you can ignore the repair garden gameplay and just play all the match-3 levels if you wanted to.

Weaknesses

Social could’ve been better integrated
- You can connect to Facebook, but basically all it’s for is to send and request for lives when you run out.
- There’s no way to see your friends progress or compete with your friends. This seems like a missed opportunity especially for a game that fosters such a good sense of community.
- The Task Popup has a tab called “Newsfeed” and “Friends.” The friends tab would’ve been the perfect place to add your facebook friends name and profile, then some info on their progress in the game or the name of their pet. The Newsfeed tab already looks like a Facebook wall! Why not use it as an event stream where you can see tasks or levels your friends just completed.
- Have your friends in neighborhood
Level difficulty balancing
- The flow of level difficulty is a bit off. After level 60, the difficulty is ramped up pretty quickly with hard levels happening one after the other instead of a good flow of hard levels padded with easy or medium difficulty levels.
- Some levels also get a “hard label” though others that seem just as hard don’t get one. You also don’t get extra or special rewards for completing “hard” labelled levels so it seems odd to me that they would make a distinction for those.
Uneven sessions
- Because of the level difficulty balancing, sessions can feel uneven sometimes. If I’m on a streak, I can zip through multiple levels and get lots of tasks done feeling really accomplished when I’m done with my sessions. Alternatively hard levels that take 10 or more tries to finish can span 2 or more sessions where nothing was completed. (The player is given 5 lives)
No permanent upgrades or boosters
- If the levels really will get much harder over the course of the game one way to fix that is by having permanent upgradeable boosters. You could sell extra heart slots so that the player can have up to 10 hearts which would help with uneven sessions as well.
Economy balancing
- Won’t really dig too deep on the economy here, but some things definitely feel unbalanced. A 5 heart refill costs 900 coins as does a continue play, and the player gets around 50-80 coins per level.
Themes for power ups
- While everything else is in keeping with the garden theme, the power ups seem out of theme. The power ups are things like rocket, tnt, and dynamites. I think things like garden tools would have been more appropriate. Usually things like power up themes are not a big deal for me, but for a game that has a lot of attention to detail and puts a big important on story, this could be improved.

RE-ENGAGEMENT

The game uses push notifications to re-engage the player. You receive notifications when:

Your lives are refilled
You’ve been away from the game for a while
Lucky wheel is ready for a spin (once a day)

The thing that makes the notifications effective is that they are non-generic and include story elements. It’s great as is, but I think they could’ve gone even further making it more personalized. Since they have your player name, they could do a lot more creative personal notifications in keeping with the vibe in-game.

MONETIZATION

The monetization is fairly simple with just 1 currency, coins.

Used For:

Speed up tasks
Buy boosters
Buying extra moves or time in time based levels
Refilling lives

Gained By:

Bought using real currency
After every level completed
Daily wheel bonus
From NPCs in random game events
Randomly dropped in game events
End of each day
Video Ads

Gardenscapes doesn’t offer anything that new or revolutionary in terms of monetization techniques. It’s mainly reliant on the player buying extra moves and heart refills. The game gives out coins frequently, but at pretty low quantities so while this gives players incentive to make purchases, it’s also frustrating to grind for those coins and you’re more wary of spending them as they’re pretty hard to accumulate. I think they could find a better balance between giving out coin rewards, but still putting enough pressure on players to want to spend those coins.

I would like to do a deeper dive into the economy, but my initial reaction is that the pricing of lives and extra moves is a bit imbalanced since it has a $1 dollar. The value you get from that purchase could have diminishing returns when you gauge it by purchase satisfaction since it’s possible that you buy extra moves but still fail the stage or buy a set of extra lives for the equivalent of 1 average session. I think it might be hard to keep players purchasing long term. That’s why I believe permanent upgrades are a good way to go.