Gnomes Garden

Short version: 62%

While there is nothing inherently wrong with Gnomes Garden, it is simply just decent time management game that you will most likely forget five minutes after finishing it.

Long version:

Gnomes Garden is a typical casual time/resource management game: you have 1-3 workers, whose task is to gather resources (food, wood, stone, and crystals) to spend on production facilities and on clearing road obstacles that prevent you from reaching the end of the stage.
Problem is, the developers knew how the core mechanics of such a game work, but they had serious issues with the details. All gameplay elements are introduced in the starting stages, leaving nothing than endless repetition for the majority of its 49 levels. At least reaching gold times on them is a challenging task; maybe a bit too much, I regularly had about 1-3 seconds left on the clock.

Interestingly, the game uses 3D models, meaning it is more demanding than most titles in this genre. But that is not why it has such a mediocre score, but because it does absolutely nothing to stand out in the sea of similar time management games: there is next to no story, the atmosphere is generic fairy tale, the whole game is… bland. Good enough for a casual game, but not even the least bit memorable.

Enjoyable time management game with some annoying technical issues.

Good level design with lots of renewable resources, so the strategy is mainly in figuring out when to build and upgrade production centers. Hard to get completely stuck, but sometimes challenging to get three stars. I missed getting three stars on about a third of the levels the first time around, and liked the game enough to want to go back and replay them.

Major downsides:

The sides are cut off in fullscreen mode on a 4:3 monitor, occasionally cutting off things you need to click on. It mostly works in windowed mode, but the resources needed tooltips are sometimes cut off, so you have to guess what you need, and the window's too small to play comfortably. (Or maybe I just need new glasses.)

A bug with the same achievement popping up every five seconds when I replayed levels after completing the game. Irritating enough to make the game unplayable unless I turn off the sound.

Clickable areas aren't well defined and are sometimes misaligned, so when objects are close together, it can be difficult to click on the right thing.

I had enough fun with the game to recommend it despite these issues, but they might be dealbreakers for someone else.

you know "12 labours of hercules" games ?

then this is exactly same concept.

make your own opinion :D


+ good small game
+ good amount of level
+ challenge to reach 3 stars on some level


- too high price imho