Did you ever check the pulse of your kids or yourself when playing a video game? You’ll be surprised how stressful gaming can be. – Especially when playing today’s action packed 3rd generation video game console titles, displayed in HD with Dolby Surround sound. Aren’t games supposed to be a fun and relaxing leisure activity?

I haven’t played a game that didn’t involve a timer, objective or other blood pressure raising factor in years. Yes, even Viva Piñata becomes stressful onces you reach a certain level.

Destineer Studios kindly sent us a their latest game Harvest in that Heartland – from what I first thought is a John Deere advertisement, due to the oversized green tractor company logo on the DS game box. Praised as Harvest Moon meets SimCity, I approached the game with plenty skepticism. Fast forward 3 hours, I had a farm, chickens, several veggie patches and I was considering buying a virtual tractor (the one with the yellow buck) to make my already stress free and self paced farm life even easier.

Harvest in the Heartland uses the stylus and buttons to navigate the player’s farmer, select tools and take care of jobs on hand. There are no preset goals to reach, the player can build and operate a farm as big or small as he/she likes. The game does require some small upkeep in form of painting buildings and taking care of your animals. Failure to do so can result in the death of an animal, which simply disappears (in a child friendly manner). However, all the tasks required to prevent this from happening are easy to master. Most importantly, the game does not fire any cheap shots in form of natural disasters, diseases or other frustrating unexpected or unavoidable events. Unfortunately, Harvest in the Heartland is not entirely without flaws. The tutorial and in-game help is extremely weak and essentially useless. The instruction manual provides a little more insight, but for the most part it comes down to trial and error. Another minor annoyance is the loading times, which are surprisingly frequent and long for such a small game.

Bottom Line: Harvest Heartland is a cute farm game for kids (8+) and adults, as long as you don’t mind it’s minor flaws and John Deere branding.

IMPORTANT: Don’t forget to save your game (often). Harvest in the Heartland does not have an Autosave feature. My DS ran out of power while playing, resulting in a $24.000 (virtual Dollar) loss. Plan the location of new building carefully. Your fancy (green) tractor needs space to pass between buildings.

John Deere Harvest in the Heartland

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