Gnome Town is the latest Facebook game title from Playdom. It is RPG/building game along the line of major hit games like FrontierVille and Ravenwood Fair.

In Gnome Town, you play the character of a gnome, who has moved to the forest leaving behind the busy city life, but the grass isn’t greener on the other side of the river. On arriving you learn that the Evil Gnome King has taken over the forest and it is up to you to save it.

The game is a big bundle of farming, rearing, exploring, building, battles, and adventure. Like a couple of game reviews that we have brought to you lately, Gnome Town also doesn’t feature the traditional energy system that limits your period of playability, making it a good choice for the casual gamers.

In Gnome Town, there are three important resources that you should keep your eyes on to make sure that you progress smoothly – Food, wood, and Machete. Food is used to perform task instantly, while wood is required to build new buildings. You can amass both of them through farming and choppin down mushrooms, as well as by completing quests. Machete is very important if you want to clear out the forest, either to expand your town or for completing quests. I notice that, we get a machete and a game credit when we level up. So, you will be needing more always.

The game quests are focused on the main story of the game – rescuing animals of the forest (imprisoned by the Evil Gnome King), and finding surviving gnomes and lost civilizations, with the ultimate goal to save and bring back the Gnome King. Rescued animals will become your helpers, allowing you do perform multiple tasks at a time.

Work on multiple tasks, pause and resume tasks

Despite the fact that the game is not energy-based, and you having several helpers to perform multiple tasks at a time, the time required to perform tasks are awfully long comparing to the amount of resources and experience you receive. To overcome the problem you can used food to perform task instantly, or pause certain tasks and works on more important tasks at hand.

Still got to make a mark there

In Gnome Town, there are certain statistics that you will need to keep on improving. They are Brawl, Journey, and Party. Using these stats, players to pit their might against each other through a battle/competition called Gnomespedition, where you can choose to interact with another player through either of these three stats and the player with a higher rating (rating of the player and their Gnome Town friends) of that particular stat wins. The info icon below your town’s name contains all the stats regarding your town, competition etc.

Different buildings and items in the game will increase one of more of these three stats by different points.

Other social elements includes sending and receiving gifts, sharing bonus, helping each other as staff in different Gnome Town buildings, and visiting each other.

Game items are not massive, but its hard to own them all.

The game has a cartoonish, yet fantasy-type graphics, and sure looks cute. Game interface is laid out well and doesn’t interface with the game screen, and menus and icons are neatly laid out at the bottom of the screen. Game music and sounds are cute too, but becomes redundant in the long run.

Overall, Gnome Town is a nice game for the casual gamers, since it don’t have energy-based limitations, or friends-based expansion (leaving Gnomespedition aside). The only con I can write about at the moment is the amount of insanely long period of time required to perform tasks. But, I will still recommend the game for all you game lovers out there.

(Play Gnome Town Now)

Zynga's CityVille

Leading developer of Facebook games Zynga is on the verge of churning out yet another game.

The game to be released was first hit the news few months back. The title of the new game is CityVille.

According to CityVille’s genereal manager, Sean Kelley, “CityVille is where Monopoly meets Main Street.”

In CityVille, players will take the role of a city manager and build infrastructure, start business, take care of transport, import and exports, and trade with other players.

Zynga says CityVille is its most social game. The beta version of the game will be available in five languages – English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian in the coming weeks.

Zynga has more than 225 million monthly users and holds many of the top spots in terms of monthly active users starting with FarmVille. Some other popular Zynga’s game holding a spot on the top 25 games in the past many months are Texas HoldEm Poker, FrontierVille and Mafia Wars.

The last game Zynga released was FrontierVile where players take care of their homestead, now has an average of 28 million monthly users. It was launched in June.

How CityVille will fare is yet to be seen, but given Zynga’s current run, let’s hope this game will also be as appealing as Zynga’s other titles.

This Facebook game is just three week old. My City Life has been attracting users on Facebook like bees. It has already broken the 2 million mark becoming the number one fastest growing Facebook game of the past week.

According to appdata, on February 19 at 6:00 Pm GMT, My City Life has 2,398,235  total users with a weekly growth percentage of 38.2%.

A sim-type game, My City Life has the regular spin like any other building games on Facebook; involvement of friends, free gifts, free daily coins, leveling up, expansion and so on.

Apart from the regular building of homes, laying roads, and spending time landscaping our small patch of land, ‘My City Life’ players have to take care of many variables in the game like pollution, crime, workforce, citizens, tourism, fame and so on.

One has to spend time thinking and considering the possible outcome of every action taken in the game. For example, business building gives more game coins (collected in the form of taxes) than houses within a specified time, but setting up business structures will increase crime rate. Too much of anything will result in something negative. So one  has to strike a balance between building a city and running it smoothly.

My City Life is not the best looking building game on Facebook, but the interface is easy to use and icons are self-explainable. Addition of statistics in the game makes it more interesting and challenging.

Last but not the least, one needs balanced stats to progress through the game.

So folks, join the herd and show ‘em how a city should be run at My City Life.