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Grimm's Hatchery

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Developer: Amaranth Games Publisher: Amaranth Games Genre: Puzzle & Casual > General Released: Feb 12, 2007 Players: 1 Website Download Purchase

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- Grimm's Hatchery Review

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Mike Hommel: 7

On the plus side, this is an Insaniquarium game wrapped in a fairly detailed crunchy RPG shell. On the minus side, the Insaniquarium part is pretty bad. Specifically, it's extremely repetitive - every time it's click on eggs, click on hungry pets, click until your fingers bleed on angry monsters that always come from the same spot. No special items or tricks to liven that up, just those 3 things to click on. And more fundamentally, something that just killed it for me: the click recognition is really bad. You'll click 3 or 4 times to get one egg sometimes (this is a problem in menus too, where you can only click on, say, half of a picture of an egg to select it), and other times you get 3 eggs in one click. If the clicking were not so troublesome, this would be a very good game, easy 8. If it also kept up with new stuff to do in the hatchery portion regularly, it would be a high 9.

John Bardinelli: 7

Not an original concept in casual games (see Insaniquarium), Grimm's Hatchery nevertheless scores points for a lush, fantasy-style setting that draws you into the game. The goal is to raise money by hatching and selling magical pets. As you earn cash through your work you can buy items to make your farming easier and eventually progress through the kingdom to new areas. There are lots of side-quests going on to keep you interested, but the troubling fact is the game is horribly linear. Even though you feel like you can do whatever you want, in reality beating the game means walking a narrow line of success or defeat. Egg gathering later in the game becomes a nuisance, as there are so many things you have to click you'll be lucky if your mouse survives the torture.

William Usher: 7

What if Pok_mon was an RTS game? Well, it would be Grimm's Hatchery, a breed-e'm-and-sell-e'm strategy game that manages to be as fun as it is thought-provoking. The general concept of breeding little monsters/pets is to either sell the eggs, or further expand your breeding ground by hatching the eggs and repeating the breeding process. But it's not all about making money on some little critters' babies. There's also designated missions that keeps the tension high and the replay values intact. Just as an added note, I found myself strangely addicted to wanting to complete this game's main quest. I guess the non-stop gameplay and constant requirement of undivided attention really added a necessary element of intrigue. That's definitely a good thing for this game. Although, when it comes to the sound effects and music, Grimm's Hatchery manages to set up a meager standard to keep majority of audiences entertained. But even though the aesthetics aren't remarkable, they are fairly acceptable for a fairly entertaining, but highly addictive game.

Caspian Prince: 7

Here we have a game for which we have finally found a legitimate use for the word "dichotomy". Grimms Hatchery is an odd combination between frantic but somewhat repetitive and dull mouse thrashing, and labouriously slow management made slightly irritating by a rather clunky user interface. The fundamental game concept is quite sound and the storyline, though solid, is straightforward enough for you to know more or less what to do. The trouble is that it takes so long to progress a single game and you get no feedback whatsoever as to whether you're likely to succeed or not with whatever your current management tactics are.

There are plenty of cute little surprises hidden in the management part of the game to make it a bit less repetitive and tedious but the other half of the game - the mouse thrashing bit - never gets any more exciting than the most trivial of free games found on the internet.

This game is essentially a rip-off of Feeding Frenzy wrapped up a different way and as such it's portal-fodder: the game equivalent of a Big Mac and large fries. Ultimately it doesn't really satisfy but I expect it will sell in large numbers.