Well, it’s a lazy Sunday here. The house is comfortably quiet, and all I hear is the murmur of the TV from the other room where Max is playing his Wii games. So, I thought I would take this moment to quickly pop on and try out the latest builder / time management game called Weather Lord.
It seemed like an interesting premise. Controlling the weather and all that, and it made for quite a nice morning, as I sipped my tea and controlled the clouds, sun, and rain in order to help my farms grow.
Well, it’s a lazy Sunday here. The house is comfortably quiet, and all I hear is the murmur of the TV from the other room where Max is playing his Wii games. So, I thought I would take this moment to quickly pop on and try out the latest builder / time management game called Weather Lord.
It seemed like an interesting premise. Controlling the weather and all that, and it made for quite a nice morning, as I sipped my tea and controlled the clouds, sun, and rain in order to help my farms grow.
Now, I’m a big fan of builder games, so I was really excited to give this one a whirl. They begin by showing you how to create the weather. So to start, you need to buy a sun and some fluffy white clouds. You have farms you need to tend to, and as the individual in control of the weather, you have a responsibility to the crops to give each one exactly what they need in order to grow.
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Certain kinds of crops need different things. For example, corn just needs sun and rain. Grapes need sun, rain, and partly cloudy days to grow. Oranges need clouds, sun, and wind. To create each of these different weather patterns, you need to buy and mix certain elements to get what you want. So for rain, you need to combine two clouds. For partly sunny skies, you need one sun and one cloud. For a thunderstorm, you need wind and rain, and so on.
After you’ve combined weather patterns, you can always break them up. So, if you need a sun once again, and you’ve combined it with a cloud to make a partly cloudy day, you just click and drag the weather to the hammer at the top of the screen. This will break the weather apart, and you’ll have a sun and cloud once more.
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This game was charming, but hard. The clouds and sun drifting across your screen were very cute, but made it quite difficult to keep track of where everything was. They would just roam the screen until you grabbed it and put it to work. The time limits they had in order to win gold, silver, or bronze on each level were pretty challenging as well. I was able to reach them on the first few levels, but as you continued to complicate matters by adding more weather pattern combinations and factories, solar farms, and wind turbines, I was quickly lost and needed time to figure out what was going on.
I enjoy builder games that let you take a look at the objectives first before the time starts. So you can plan out your strategy. Let’s face it, my reflexes aren’t what they used to be, and what I love about builder games is that, with a proper strategy, I can do fairly well. With Weather Lord, the time started right away, so I was forced to do a mad dash at buying weather patterns and harvesting crops. I found that if I repeated the level, of course, I had a much better score, because I was able to construct a better strategy once I was familiar with my resources and my objectives.
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Overall, Weather Lord has its pros and cons. A pro is that it’s quite challenging, so it’s not going to be one of those game you’ll beat in an hour or two, so you’ll definitely get your money’s worth. A con is… well, it’s challenging, so I can see myself becoming quite frustrated and breaking the lull of this quiet Sunday morning with the sounds of my mad clicking, as I strive over and over again to get that gold star on all the levels. Either way, if you’re a builder / time management fan, then it’s definitely worth taking a look at. Besides, it’s not every day that you get to be a Weather Lord.
