Aaah, mowing the lawn. Such a Sunday morning pursuit. The arm-wrenching ripcord pulls, the endless trips to empty the grass carrier and the fact that your lawnmower can only turn clockwise and is likely to explode when making contact with fences, sheep and rocks. What? That doesn’t happen to you? I must be confusing real-life and the basic gameplay of Mowy Lawn an iOS and Android app developed by Playstack Limited.
The purpose of Mowy Lawn is to mow every blade of grass in a given level. However, there are a few things that make it trickier than you might otherwise think. Firstly, once you start your mower it keeps going, and all you can do to avoid it hitting the myriad of obstacles in it’s way is to tap on the mower to change its direction to the next one clockwise. i.e. if you’re moving up the screen, tapping once starts moving your mower, right, tap again, and it moves down, a further tap would start moving him left etc. All you have to do is set off from the starting point, head around the grassy areas trimming the grass and then going back to the starting area without touching any dangerous things.
It’s not as easy as it may sound. As the levels progress, the challenges increase as well. There are moving platforms, unpredictably moving sheep, and crushing walls to name a few. However, your mission remains the same, to trim that grass like your very mechanical life depended on it.
There are lots of different lawnmowers you can buy for in-game currency. These mowers come in different looks, speeds and costs. Obviously faster mowers will get the job done more quickly but you have to a lot more reactive with your movement to compensate. On the other hand you might just want to move around a giant cat that eats grass, which is fine, there’s a mower there for you.
If augmented reality is your thing, then Mowy Lawn has something for you. There is an AR mode, which removes the background of the game ands fills it with whatever your camera is looking at, at the time. It’s nothing special to be honest. It neither adds nor detracts from the game itself, but it’s there if you want real-life showing up being a floating grass island.
OK, it’s a mobile game with-in app purchases, but for those of us who aren’t a fan of splashing out with real cash unless it suits us, just how intrusive are the adverts? Honestly, they’re not the most intrusive adverts I’ve ever had in a game but you can certainly tell they’re there. They’ll pop up after levels, you can watch adverts to refuel your mower, or to earn more coins. It’s a necessary evil, for many mobile apps to have ads, but when there isn’t a ‘pay-to-make-them-go-away-forever’ option, it jars a little.
Graphically it’s rather so-so as well. With everything having this sort of Minecraft blockiness look to it. Although, where the graphics are a little underwhelming the music and sounds are surprisingly jaunty and do add to my overall enjoyment of the game.
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Jim Franklin
Jim Franklin is a freelance writer, living in Derby UK with his wife and his player 3. When time allows he likes nothing more than losing himself in a multi-hour gaming session. He likes most games and will play anything but prefers MMO's, and sandbox RPG's.
