Hope's Farm is a match-3/SIM hybrid.
The difficulty choices are nice, giving you the option to play timed and/or a limited of moves, or without any restrictions.
Fill orders (via match-3) to earn money to buy more crops/decorations for your farm.
Crops grow at an incredibly fast rate, meaning that you really don't have to put too much thought into the timing portion. The planning part comes from what you decide to harvest. Your storage can only hold so much, and when it's full, you either have to sell it or "delete" it in 25-item increments.
There is an order board with requests, and you can't fill the order (by playing the match-3 portion) until you have all of the listed items, so if you harvested too much of something, you'll have to delete some in order to grab the crops you need. You'll usually have 5+ orders to choose from, so that helps.
In addition to the order board, you have a book with quests in it. Quests can be things like:
- Buy one chicken coop
- Sell 20 eggs
- Decorate your farm with a scarecrow
- Water 6 sunflowers
Upon completion of quests, you will earn money, gems (used to purchase power-ups in the M3 portion) and experience. Going up levels unlocks more items you can buy and more quests.
Match-3:
The M3 portion of the game is nicely-polished and fun to play. The aforementioned power-ups that you can buy with your gems are represented by a trowel (remove one piece), a cyclone (shuffle) and lightning (removed all of one type of tile). I didn't need to use these at all, since the bombs for making 4+ matches were sufficient help.
Gems can also be used to extend the amount of time on the clock and/or add a number of moves, if you're playing in that mode.
Customers are on the left side of the screen, and when their orders are all filled, the level will end. Some of these things are gained by simple matching, others will need to be brought to the bottom of the screen before they can be sold.
When you're low on water, you'll play a match-3 round to clear a path for the water to reach the well. This works... err... Well!
SIM:
Click on a field once to bring up the pic of a scythe, which you can then drag around to harvest everything in sight (if you so choose). Same for watering, only you'll see a water bucket. Good in theory, and I liked the ease of harvesting/watering, except that it's really easy to accidentally click in the wrong place if you have things close together.
Decorating/purchasing really could have used some tweaking. Open the store, click on the item and DRAG it onto the screen where you want to place it. It was counter-intuitive for me, and I kept accidentally either closing the store or placing things where I didn't want them. You can move them, but it's kind of clicky to do so.
Speaking of which, if you're placing multiple items, you have to do the entire process for each item. Open store, drag and drop where you want it, then start over. This is really tedious when you're trying to place a path!
You have a limited amount of items you can purchase (ie. 4 coconut trees, two duck ponds), so managing money isn't something you'll need to worry about.
Verdict:
This is a fun match-3/SIM hybrid with 100 levels (orders) and many quests to complete. I really enjoyed the match-3 portion, and the SIM part is good, but could have been a little better-optimized. I really like that once all of the orders have been completed, you can replay any of them, meaning that you can keep playing indefinitely.
There were some missed opportunities that could have made this game an absolute must-have, but in its current state, I'd say that it's pretty addictive and a nice way to pass the time.
