Games.com Diary: Farm Frenzy: Pizza Party

I gave this week's current #11 most downloaded game a try today. The comments on this game, Farm Frenzy: Pizza Party ranged from "Totally addictive!" to "It's the most boring game mankind has ever seen." -- which makes it the perfect game to try out for my Game Diary series. So I hit the play button and prepared for either the best or worst experience of my week so far.

The first thing that something was weird about the game was I noticed was the diabolical-looking pig holding a slice of pizza. I'm pretty sure those red toppings on the slice are pepperoni, and last I checked, pepperoni was made from pork. Mildly disturbing, but so far, nothing game-breaking.

The game presented me with a small plot of land, occupied only by a lone chicken. Said chicken started eating patches of grass (generated by clicking around the farm) and producing eggs, which I collected in the warehouse. Unfortunately, I stopped paying attention for a few seconds and my chicken died from starvation. No, literally. I've played many a time management game and while I've had restaurant customers get angry, fashion models look horrible and pizzas come out undercooked, but I've never had anything die on me. Makes you rethink "time management."

I ended up with no way of completing the level's objective (collect two eggs) and was forced to restart. Finally I completed the level (no thanks to the slow-moving chicken) and started the second, which introduced me to the shipping van responsible for (slowly) trucking my eggs to the city and sell them for a profit.

The third level required me to build a factory in order to manufacture powdered eggs. Okay, easy enough right?

Then a panda bear showed up on the farm. Yes, you read that correctly. A panda bear. On my farm. It proceeded to wave its arms madly and kill all of my chickens. Apparently, the way to prevent this from happening is to rapidly click on the bear (again, really? A panda bear on my farm?) to capture it. News to me!

So that was my first ten minutes or so with Farm Frenzy. A little slow and frustrating at the onset -- this quickly turned into hilarious pandemonium (or really, panda-monium, am I right?). In the end, the game felt unbalanced and frankly, pretty confusing. But maybe that's just me.

Have you played Farm Frenzy? How do you like it? Is it a good time management game?