Chicken Farm 2K17

Whatever kind of business you may own, it’s always important to expand it over time in order to attract more customers and earn more money. Incidentally, this is also the formula for most strategy games, except that you usually have a base of some sorts, and by expanding it you gain more units or something comparable to that. However, even simpler concepts can be created that way.

Chicken Farm 2K17 is a strategy/clicker game that may have a fancy name, but it’s not quite as fancy in terms of gameplay mechanics. While all the ingredients for a fun clicker game are here, such as research points, simple mechanics and upgrades, the pacing is way off, thus making it difficult to keep yourself entertained. This is not even a late game problem like in most clickers, because things are painfully slow right from the start.

You have a few dollars to your name at the beginning, which can be used to buy a chicken. The goal is to sell the eggs produced by this chicken, buy more chickens and continue the trend until you have a huge factory under your control.

Unfortunately, the chickens lay eggs once every half a minute or so, and you can only sell them for two or three dollars. Since you need 10, 20 or even 35 dollars to get even the most basic types of chickens, you can see how this is a problem.

You can also click to earn money, but every click amounts to only ten cents, which is a bit discouraging. There are also research points to worry about, which are produced by a different type of chickens, a type that doesn’t even lay eggs. Since upgrades are required in order to make meaningful progress, it’s obvious that you have to sacrifice productivity in order to gain research points, which slows you down even more.

It’s a shame that this is the case, because the game appears to be pretty fun if you could only move quickly enough to see what it has to offer. There are dozens of upgrades and expansion options to go through, so it would be nice to get them without wasting hours of your life in the process. Thus, better pacing is something the game really needs in order to be worth the effort.

Chicken Farm 2K17 is obviously not GOTY material, regardless of its final incarnation. However, it could have been a lot more enjoyable if it didn’t take so long to achieve anything meaningful along the way.