Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I honestly don't know who the game is for. It's a massive time-sink that begs for real-world money and has insultingly simple gameplay, even for little kids. Gameloft & Hasbro seem to be counting on people's love of the license and OCD tendencies to be interested in this game to the point of spending money. There are a TON of chances to spend real money, even on accident, and sometimes it's a very large amount of money so be sure you don't allow in-app purchases. The basic break-down is this: Buy pony with in-game, real, or social money, buy a building or decoration the same way, use the building and pony to make an item to get more in-game currency, and repeat ad nauseum. Meanwhile you play a mini-game with a pony to let them make better items. A mini-game you need to spend some form of currency on. Story: It's a cute, fairly interesting story. Sloppily handled. There's little cut-scenes (fully voiced with original cast! Granted some clips are sound bites) at the start of the game and sprinkled throughout. It's an alternative universe, kind of, which takes place at the first episode of Friendship is Magic. Nightmare Moon breaks free and takes over Equestria to put it in darkness. Twilight Sparkle manages to escape to PonyVille and keep Nightmare Moon's darkness at bay. You need to find and activate all the Elements of Harmony, which take the form of shrines spread across the map. I say it's handled sloppily because despite that premise, they still act like the events of the show happened, occasionally referring back to them. I was interested in this version of events where Twilight Sparkle has to draw the Ponyville back after everyone ran away, find the Elements and make friends, but after the opening all that only matters in terms of gameplay mechanics. "Push back the darkness" by buying a new sector of land. "Draw ponies back to Ponyville" by spending currency. "Find the elements" by eventually unlocking that sector which has once (you always know where they are) and spending a resource to activate it. "Make friends" by having that pony and playing their mini-game. Very disappointing the developers didn't commit to the story. Gameplay: It has (very basic) city building & resource management, and really simple mini-games consisting of playing catch, catching apples and flying to collect clouds / money. There's really nothing to the city building so it won't interest most adults and I doubt it will engage any kids. Once you buy a building you place it and assign a pony to work there and start making something to get bits (in-game currency). You can assign a total of three ponies to a building. If you buy a farm, a pony can start making carrots and later carrot cake for instance. Once an item starts being made you have to wait for it to finish. This can range from a 30 second wait to half a day depending on the building and item. In the meantime your ponies also have a counter that's going down, and once it's over you can play one of two mini-games with them. After which you have to wait again. These mini-games are used to get experience to level-up your ponies so they can make better items (that's over-stating it really). The last mini-game you can only place when a pony levels-up, which they can only do 5 times and then you can't play with them anymore. For the catch mini-game there's a ring that closes around the ball as it flies away from the pony; it seems if you hit the ball as the ring is about to close you get the maximum amount of points, meaning you are swiping at the same spot, at the same time, every time. Speed doesn't really change and the arc barely changes. It would be hard to make it simpler. I don't think most kids will play it for more than a few minutes, and this game has you doing it a LOT. The catching apples mini-game isn't bad, you run back and forth catching apples as they fall while avoid bad apples. Aside from being repetitive, the only real downside is that the bad apples spawn randomly in place of the good apples, and I've had a few times where nearly all the apples that fell were bad. You get 20 points per apple and I generally get around 300-400 in the time they give you, but on those instances I'll get 60-140. Since you potentially have real money on the line, this is very bad. The last mini-game has you flying and collecting money and white clouds (to go faster) while avoiding storm clouds and Shadowbolts (bad flying ponies). It's reminiscent of Jetpack Joyride, just much simpler. It's the most interesting out of the mini-games easily but there's just a few set "scenes" that are used to randomly make the level and sometimes you'll get very few white clouds and / or money to pick up. There's little quests you can do which involve buying buildings or ponies, or unlocking sectors of land or playing a game X many times. You can use real money gems to skip these and act like you completed them, even getting the quest rewards. Not much thought was put into these, made obvious by a few of them. "Spike is hungry for gems! Give him 10 Gems to complete the quest (Or 4 Gems to skip)." Some of the dialogue is cute but the main point of these quests is just to keep you interested and working toward some goal. Social / Currency: There's 3 forms of currency. In-game Bits, social Hearts, and real money Gems. Some items take a crazy amount of Bits, Hearts or Gems, but if you're patient you can always build up to that amount for the former two. Hearts are gotten through free gift-giving with friends, and you can give two hearts a day. If you have at least one friend willing to send you a Heart, you can slowly build up to the amount needed. The extent of the social aspect is seeing their layout and the gift-giving. The game can connect with other people via the Gameloft Live service or facebook. Once connected you can see your friends and invite them to play. If they play you can look at their version of PonyVille to see how they laid things out. Conclusion: It has a very nice presentation but the simple extremely repetitive mechanics, combined with the long wait times, lackluster effort behind the games, and the overwhelming greediness of the atmosphere makes it un-recommendable. Since it's free initially you may want to check out the opening cut-scene and look at the fan favorite ponies that made it into the game, along with some surprising choices. If you want The Dude pony, he's in there. Along with the Jesus Quintana pony, which I always thought was weird to have in a series for kids...