Bottom Line: Dr. Panda Farm is the latest addition to the Pandaverse. Dr. Panda runs a little farmers’ co-op, making farm-to-table goods available to all of his friends.
If you’d like to purchase Dr. Panda Farm ($2.99, iPad/iPhone), please use the handy link provided so they’ll know who sent you.
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No ads, no in-app purchases, external links to developer’s other apps in parent protected area
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We start off with Dr. P inside a virtual map of the farming community with his little farmers’ co-op surrounded by little farm plots with sale prices on them. We can’t enter any of the farms that aren’t paid for yet, so let’s check out the co-op itself. Inside we find Dr. Panda ready to sell food to his friend…but he doesn’t have any product. What to do?
The only farm available to us to start is the grain farm where they grow what appears to be wheat in order to make bread. Little ones must water the crop to make it grow, take it to the mill to be ground, and then take it to the baker to make into different loaves of bread. Once five loaves are baked, Dr. Panda takes it back to the co-op to sell. As items are sold, users accumulate money/points that allow them to purchase other farms to produce different products.
Each farm produces different items that can be made or turned into a finished product to sell. Since all of the customers at the co-op want different items, it’s important to get all of the farms up and running so that you’ll have the things they need. Your little farmer will end up being able to produce breads, jams, and salads and to gather honey, eggs, and milk. This makes for a popular and well-stocked store.
Watch Ellie bring this app to life here:
What I liked:
- Once we got rolling in this game, the princess and I had a ball building up Dr. Panda’s virtual farm. The constant activity and need to tend crops and keep things moving in order to accomplish your goals is a nice representation of what farm life is really like.
- My favorite thing to do was to poke the chickens so that they’d lay eggs. I know it is technically just tapping, but to me it was poking and then they’d squawk a little and lay an egg. (Disclaimer: Kelli would never actually poke a chicken. That wouldn’t be nice. Plus they’d probably peck her if she did.)
- The visual representation of milking the cows completely CRACKED ME UP. It’s a little silly and a lot of fun. Plus, the cow patties disappear when you just tap them (I only wish it was this way in real life!)
- Starting from scratch kind of frustrated me with this one, I felt like it started off a bit slow. Thank goodness for my little princess who was willing to play for me and get the Panda farm going so that I could play with everything.
- There were a few occasions when I had difficulty making something happen and I wish that I could have been given a bit more of a visual clue. The first example that comes to mind is when baking the bread I initially had difficulty getting the unbaked loaves in the oven. I was trying to drag them in there when all I needed to do was tap inside the open oven. But it took me longer than it should have to figure it out, and I found myself wishing for a little help.
Overall, I was afraid at first that this might be the first Dr. Panda app that I wasn’t going to be squealing with delight over because of the slow start up, but it turned into what might be one of my favorites in my Dr. Panda library of apps. It’s such a cute simple way of representing to children the basic concepts of how farms must be constantly tended to reap the benefits. 5 stars!
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Kelli lives on a horse farm and doesn’t get to bake bread or milk cows. Smart Apps for Kids was paid a fee to review this app in a priority fashion.
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