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5.8 mid-normal
I'd like to dedicate this game review to explorers everywhere. You don't have to have a boat... or a hat with a feather in it... or a talking horse... to be an explorer. There are places in your neighborhood that no one's ever been to. Why not check them out? Maybe you'll find something interesting?
Imagine you part some trees and step into a magical fantasy land. Before you can snap a picture with your cell phone, a fire fuzzy named Scorch shoots up to you and tells you that you need to earn one million gold pieces to buy back the Magical Forest from the Chainmaw Logging Company. If you don't, the forest creatures are going to suffer a fate worse than death. (I assume in this case the loggers will build a giant wooden box one hundred feet square, put all the forest animals in the bottom, and then fill the box to overflowing with live chickens.)
Such is the story behind Magical Forest, a new monster ranch strategy game from 3 Blokes Studios. If you've played Grimm's Hatchery, this is the same game without puzzles or heart. If you just bought a new mouse and want to test it out, or you hooked up a foot pedal to substitute for a mouse button and want to put it through its paces, this is a great game. A lot of clicking is involved.
You start in a forest clearing with four honey fuzzies. These are little walking honeycombs that eat berries and produce excrement, called resources, that people in the nearby town find very valuable. Using the mouse, you monitor your clearing and take care of your fuzzy pets. That is to say, you click on them to feed them berries or heal them, click on dropped resources to collect them, and click on invading pests to swat them with your weapon until they die. Your pets gain valuable experience points by watching you kill snakes, spiders, lizards, and birds. Just like I gain valuable experience points by watching 1970's buddy cop movies on basic cable.
The nearby town is full of at least three rascally characters. Jillian the pet vendor, Billy the talking goatman, and Flapjacks the wizard whose real name I forget. Jillian buys and sells pets, but only the ones you've unlocked. Flapjacks sells healing spells, berries, and weapons. I bought lots of berries from him, but not a single healing spell because none of my pets got wounded. Even when a giant spider came running out of the woods at them. Flapjacks' weapons are slowly eked out to you during the course of the game. So even though you have enough gold to ditch your sharp stick and buy the most expensive sword at level two, he won't sell it.
Quite often presents sprout from the ground. These contain gold, magical healing spells, experience points for your pets, or berries. Sometimes fairies or colored rocks appear. Clicking on them earns you a helper point. Get enough of these points and you can buy one of three magical contraptions. These enchanted clockwork machines automate the feeding and protecting of your pets as well as gather their resources. All you have to do is keep them wound up. Further helper points allow you to upgrade them.
Pets level up, too. When they gain enough experience points, you can increase the amount of resources they'll deposit (up to three at once) or decrease the amount of time that passes before they need to shovel down more berries. All pets have names, such as Jamie or Shannon or Norm.
Each level requires you to obtain a specific number of resources from certain pets, as well as gold. Once you reach your goal, the next pet and level will be unlocked. Periodically this results in you changing clearings as you move deeper and deeper into the forest. It's not well explained so Magical Forest is the kind of game that plays best if you have a strong imagination or short attention span or you blink a lot and miss things. Presumably the game continues in this fashion until you reach one million gold pieces.
Every now and then you're given a quest by Scorch the fire fuzzy. You might have two minutes during which you must find five presents. Or in two minutes your pets must receive zero injuries. Or in two minutes you must pick up less than twenty resources/presents/fairies. Accomplish the quest and you'll receive gold or experience points.
The biggest flaw with Magical Forest is the interface. It's confusing and messages are constantly popping up telling you to click on things or go places. You might be in the middle of a "weak harvest" quest, trying not to pick up objects, when a new object appears and the game demands you pick it up. You might be on the selling resources page when a sale allows you to complete a level and suddenly the game pops you out to the world map. When a species of pet levels up (the entire species does at once, oddly enough) and you click on the "Creature Detail" page, you're always taken to the last pet in the group, not the first. Little details like that add up and result in a game somewhat cumbersome to play. The graphics aren't bad, but there's not much to the game besides the animated world map and pet-filled forest clearings. The background music is slightly better and makes a good match for the game and its fantasy logging theme.
I only noticed two areas where Magical Forest excels over Grimm's Hatchery: Pests can enter the screen from any side, which seems more realistic. And there is no night and day cycle during which dropped eggs automatically and unfairly vanish.