Run Your Own Personal Campground In Campers!
Campers! (Free) by Glu Games Inc. is a freemium campsite management game where you will build up a camp and take part in other camp style activities like roasting marshmallows, interacting with wild animals, and discovering rare plants.
This is a game that is a lot like Farmville. Glu Games is known for its freemium titles, and while they can be fun to play, they are all the kinds of games that require an eventual monetary investment.
Campers is a social networking freemium game, so right off the bat it asks for access to your Twitter account and for access to send push notifications. It will also encourage you to connect the game to Facebook.
In Campers, your first task will be to clear bushes and build cabins. Cabins are where campers live, so you need to build plenty. When you have an empty cabin, you can invite a new camper to live in it, and each camper that you have has a special set of skills called badges.
One camper might have a badge in gardening and wildlife, which means they are skilled at those two gameplay aspects. You should try to gather campers with a range of skills for your campground.
Every camper in your campground must be personally controlled by you, which felt like too much micromanagement. To move them, or to get them to do tasks, you must draw a line from the camper to the task you want them to do. For example, want Bob the camper to clear a tree? You can't just tap him and tap the tree, you have to hold his hand all the way over there.
Each camper has a limited amount of energy, and thus can do only a limited number of activities during the day before it's time to rest. Campers will explore bushes, look for food, and hunt for wildlife, all of which consumes energy. You can restore some energy with cookies, but as you can imagine, those cookies aren't limitless.
You can also gather campers onto the bus to go exploring, where you will have goals to fulfill, such as finding four pinecones. It's tedious to do these things because you have to control each camper individually, though being able to tap on the side menu to get them to move does help.
Things on the ground must also be picked up individually, by your campers, and not with a tap of your finger, which would have been much easier.
As your campers explore, they will level up their skills and earn new badges, which will lead to new objectives and new places to visit. The game wastes no time introducing players to "arrowheads" which speed up wait times, and all in all, this is a typical freemium game. You will build things and wait, or pay money to speed it up.
There's nothing wrong with this game, exactly, but the tediousness of having to pick up every object by drawing lines around the screen frustrating and illogical. There are much better freemium games out there - I'd suggest taking a pass on this one.
