Games for Learning Reviews
Food Force
URL: http://www.food-force.com/
Cost: Free
Estimated Age Range: 10-18
Reviewer: Andy Rose
Food Force is a collection of minigames created by the United Nations World Food Programme. The goal is to raise awareness among players about worldwide hunger crises. The game takes place on the fictional island of Sheylan, where civil war and drought have created a major food shortage.
Since the game is essentially a collection of minigames, each section plays very differently than the previous one. This is both a good and a bad thing -- some of the minigames are very fun, and some are subpar. If the game had been designed initially around one core concept, more time could have been spent on making that singular concept very polished and high-quality.
The first minigame has players flying over the island in a helicopter looking for groups of starving people in order to know where to drop food supplies. This minigame is well done once the player gets the hang of it, and I thought it was a lot of fun even if it was too simple.
In the second minigame players create food packages by dragging slider bars up and down. The food packages are limited by a maximum price and a minimum nutrient value. This game is average; because, while it is fun in theory, I didn't understand how to improve my score beyond a certain point. Once you've fulfilled the requirements, there is almost no wiggle room in the composition of your food package. I wish there'd been a better explanation of how the game mechanics worked here.
The third minigame is where the player delivers his food to the starving people of Sheylan. In this minigame the difficulty jumps radically, suddenly becoming very challenging to attain a good score. As the player drops these food packages out of the back of a plane, he needs to adjust for wind speeds. The problem is there is no clear way to adjust accurately, which means the player is guessing most of the time, which leads to that particular minigame being frustrating.
During the fourth minigame the player buys supplies to ship to Sheylan. This is a very standard puzzle game although it is well executed. Different countries offer up food supplies during certain time blocks and at certain prices. The only complaint I have about this minigame is that the price doesn't have as much effect as it ought to. I played it once where I only bought food twice (everything else was a donation) and my score was only marginally better than before.
In the fifth section the player has to traverse Sheylan in a truck as quickly as possible. During the trip, he has to make several choices about whether to take the quick and difficult route or the long and easy one. The difficult routes lead to puzzle minigames, either reconstructing a bridge or finding landmines. This minigame was pretty fun and I enjoyed it.
The sixth and final minigame had the player distributing supplies to a village over a long period of time. The player was limited in their maximum supplies, so he had to distribute them wisely and certain areas would affect others. This was a fun minigame because the player was able to see how his supplies helped this community over a long period of time, depending on whether they were distributed wisely or foolishly.
This game as a whole is difficult to judge because the quality varies throughout it so much. One thing I really liked about it was it was a very short game to play through entirely, but I really wish there had been a way to skip to specific missions.
The graphics are interesting, because the cut scenes are entirely pre-rendered 3D graphics, but everything else in the game is 2D. However, the website shows you almost exclusively clips from the cut scenes, leading the potential player to believe the graphics are much better than they really are. That said, the graphics are sufficient and do suit the game's purposes, but the style isn't entirely coherent between minigames.
Food Force teaches more about the process of supplying a country with food, which it does very well, than it is about motivating people to do something about it, which is its primary goal. So while it does teach something, I think it misses the mark it set for itself.

