I had actually been enjoying this game (as much as you can enjoy watching paint dry) for over 3 months.... until I did some research for this review. Then I found out about the fucking nasty little secret hidden just under the surface. So all of a sudden my "oh my fucking god, it is a nice(ish) review!!" has turned to "burn the whole fucking thing to the ground"....

What it is

Crypto Farmer is an economic management game where you manage a server farm mining some nondescript crypto named coin. By "economic management" I mean you earn coins, then you spend them on more expensive gear so you can earn coins faster. There is shit all else to it and it can get kinda boring because of that.

Gameplay

You start with just enough coins to buy a power plant, server, and one GPU - obviously just the most basic of each or else there would be no challenge here. So you buy your shit, you put it out into the server farm and then...... you go do something else for a while. Like, a long while.

With a starter setup you only have a hashrate of 1 - hashrate being the speed at which you mine. Each point of hashrate will score you 10 blocks per hour and every 10 blocks is worth one coin. See what they did there? Swapping and changing factors of 10 to confuse the fuck out of you in case you aren't paying attention.

But of course there is a fucking catch. You can't just walk away for weeks and come back and have yourself a merry old fucking time playing again - you have a warehouse you fill up with your blocks which you then have to drag to the bank to manually trade them for coins. Your warehouse somehow magically grows as your hashrate does, and it will always fill to 100% in 24 hours.

Their white paper says something about three warehouses, but I haven't seen warehouses 2 or 3 yet. So maybe they went on a cruise and got eaten by almighty Cthulhu, maybe I am an idiot and haven't seen how to open them, or maybe their white paper is just total shit. I'm leaning towards their white paper being total shit.

You can also buy cooling units to increase your hashrate by a fixed percent, but don't fucking bother early on, the increase it gets you isn't worth shit.

Design and performance and shit

The graphics are pretty with little animations, and the whole blues and greys theme with little pops of other colour is actually kinda fucking sexy, but considering it is an idle game there really isn't so much to look at. But that also means there shouldn't be too much shit to bog down a reasonable machine. Older machines may hate you though, and old browsers will probably laugh at you like everybody did that time you split your pants at school.

The biggest problem on this side is that the sound when you trade in blocks for coins really pisses me off. Every time. Don't be a dickhead like me and leave that tab unmuted for over 3 months. Hear what the game has to offer your ears once if you really want to do it to yourself, then mute the fuck out of it. The sound of trying to illegally place gear in your field is almost as bad, so don't feel like you are missing anything by not having sound.

Also when you move an existing wind power plant to a new location in the field you end up with a non-moving ghost version as well as the proper animated version. Stupid minor glitchy shit they couldn't be fucked fixing.

Now, I have one really big fucking question for the developers: why oh why does my browser tell me this game wants to access motion sensor data on my laptop??!? If I enable it and shake my computer will blocks fall out any faster?

Where it falls down

This game is seriously fucking slow at first, unless of course you dump some money into it.

But to get anything back there is a minimum withdraw limit of $10. It will take you a long fucking time to earn enough to both pull out that much, and still have reinvested to sustain your earnings. It all depends on how fast you call fast enough, I guess, and if you play like I did it will take you a bit over 3 months to afford the 10K coins that are the equivalent of $10 real money.

Compared to other games and faucets, $10 in 3 months is actually decent, and it will obviously grow faster if you reinvestment more instead of checking out.

But (wait for it....................) there's a catch (there's always a fucking catch, right?): they have a little unobtrusive value in your account called harvest. They don't tell you shit about harvest - what it is, what it does, how to get it. They just tell you "Before using the product, be sure to carefully study the rules and conditions, as well as the user’s agreement". Rules? What rules? There are no fucking rules anywhere on the site! But if you actually read the terms of service it is hidden way down in section 4.2.1.5 - under the obligations of the people running the fucking game, some little snippet about what harvest does. And it tells you harvest is a hard limit to how many coins you can withdraw at any one time. Your harvest value starts at fucking zero, by the way.

I have looked at a bunch of forums around the place, and the people who run this piece of shit try to hide behind some bullshit like "but we told you to read the terms, so harvest isn't shady". Bull-fucking-shit. If you were completely above board you would describe exactly what it does in a place people don't have to hunt for it, in plain language not legalese.

But how do you get this magical pixie-dust harvest shit??

1) referrals - no idea how much per referral because I have no friends into any of this shit, and I probably wouldn't subject them to such a painfully agonizing head-fuck anyway

2) putting in your own money - again I have no idea how much, I am not going to give them a single goddamn cent

3) visiting their shitty little ad sites, waiting 30 seconds, and doing some math - which will award you 5 coins and 5 harvest. Woooo! One down, only 1999 more ads to go before you can check out your first $10.

So let's say that like me you have no friends and you aren't going to pay shit to these scammers up-front, so let's break down what that 10000 harvest is worth to you, by ads alone, ignoring the 3 months or more it took you already to earn your $10 in coins.

At about 35 seconds (if your head is good with the numbers, or a few more if you are like me and sometimes need a calculator because 7's and 9's are sneaky bitches), no wait, let's just say 40 seconds. Anyway, at 40 seconds per ad for 2000 ads, it is going to take you over 22 hours to get 10000 harvest..... and sometimes we need to sleep, eat, and shit, so it is going to take you 2+ days of this dicking around just to cash out your $10!! If you don't die from boredom first.

Quick distraction.... I don't usually condone this referral link shit for stuff I actively despise, but for the sake of science, does anybody want to sign up with my link so we can find out how much a referral is actually worth for this stupid fucking harvest shit???? Once I know I will post an update with how many friends you would need to make that fuckery work to withdraw your first $10. The link is https://cryptofarmer.com/?ref=winterblood

Right, where was I? Here's another thing - the terms where harvest is described are worded so fucking badly that it is just as likely that your 10000 harvest is lost when you make that $10 transaction. So you potentially need to spend 2 days and/or throw this shit at who knows how many other people for every fucking $10 you want to check out. But don't quote me on that. I am not going to click ads and invite people to a scam in the attempt to get 10000 harvest just to prove or disprove my theory.

Final words

So, there you go. Not only am I destroying these games for you, but fuck me, I'm doing it for myself now too.

One last glimmer of hope in the pile of poop that this game is - there are online reports of this game mining in your browser, but I investigated and couldn't see any evidence of it. The browser and tab were not guzzling resources. The JavaScript files I looked at did not look malicious, and were actually quite well documented. Brave was only blocking typical tracking cookies. So maybe they tried mining once but realized their fuckery was going to get them in shit??? I don't know.

If anyone has games for me to set my sights on, throw them at me in the comments. Base links only, no referrals. I have no interest in helping what are probably scam sites continue their business, or in helping you help them either.