Horse Farm

As anyone will tell you, taking care of an animal can be a lot of work, even if it’s just a cat or a dog. Things get even more troublesome if you decide to get a horse, because it will obviously not be happy with just a bit of food and a blanket to sleep on. In fact, owning a horse is sometimes more expensive than owning a car, at least if you are not living in the countryside.

Horse Farm is a sandbox simulator designed with a casual audience in mind, and it allows you the luxury of owning multiple horses without selling your house. Besides being able to buy and breed a variety of horses, you can also build an entire tourist attraction around them, which in turn enables you to get more money and buy even more expensive horse breeds. In a nutshell, it’s a great way to spend copious amounts of your time.

You start with a few simple buildings to your name, such as a small stable and a refreshment store to provide your visitors with something to chew on while they admire the horses. Later on, more and more types of buildings become available, which allow you to earn more money and take better care of the animals. Granted, the whole thing can become a bit too cumbersome after a while, especially since you have to take care of everything in real time.

As mentioned before, you have a wide variety of breeds to choose from, including Arabians, Clydesdales and Shetland ponies. However, you can also crossbreed them and come up with something unique in the process, which is also a great way to emphasize on their special characteristics. These include things like endurance, speed or jumping prowess, thus making them much more desirable specimens.

The user interface can be a bit daunting at first, mainly because there are quite a few tabs and buttons to get familiar with. The tutorial you go through at the beginning is of little help, but then again the whole game is designed with casual players in mind, so everything is fairly easy to understand, just hard to sort through at first. Lastly, the graphics are not bad either, but they are clearly designed to run in a browser and on mobile devices.

As you might expect, you can make a lot of progress much quicker by just using real money, because Horse Farm is quite full of microtransactions and virtual currencies. However, nothing’s stopping you from enjoying the game for free, even if it’s going to take you a lot longer to see meaningful results.