Farm work often builds more calluses than character. Baling hay and operating heavy machinery under the sun’s stare isn’t what I’d call fun, as even my few high school summers spent helping a farmstead to flourish had me pining for the comfort of a cubicle. It’s wearisome work, but as Story of Seasons proves, it also has its grand rewards. Watching a field of seedlings transform to a sea of stalks—along with raising a calf to not only produce milk, but also show well in competition—can be worth the hours of tilling, watering, feeding, and grooming.

The fruit of your labor is yours to ripen, but it takes time and patience to see your farm in Story of Seasons—a Harvest Moon game in everything but name—progress beyond a small patch of unripe tomatoes. Tilling dirt, planting seeds, spreading fertilizer, keeping your animals happy and healthy—the list of chores is long (and yes, these are chores.) You won’t gleefully rush to brush your two rabbits and water your spinach crop before the day’s end, but you’ll still push through these menial tasks for the good of the farm. The products that come from the processes drive you to action, and while these procedures are often tedious, the payoff of your hard work is too rich a bounty to resist.

When you’re first planted into town, there’s actually very little to do. As a new farmer looking to sell your goods and attract fresh business, your customizable character (who can be either male or female) has very few tools and tokens to work with. You’re given a ramshackle dwelling stationed on an unkempt plot of land, as well as an assortment of equipment with rugged grips and dull edges. It’s from this unremarkable cocoon you must emerge, and while the compulsion to create proper plots for crops and to tidy up this agricultural mess is strong, making any real progress takes time. Your first few weeks feel empty, and at times even aimless, since you don’t have the means to accomplish much.

It’s not just your budding flowers, fruits, and grains that determine the pace. It’s your character’s insufficient stamina that drives activity, and while cooking the various purchasable recipes and ordering an entrée at the local restaurant gives you a healthy boost of energy, the consistent burden of running out of juice is wearisome. Every swing of the axe, thrust of the hammer, or flick of the wrist as you water crops affects your stamina, and that’s a nagging, momentum-killing issue early on. Without the proper funds or food (or if it’s a Wednesday and the restaurant’s closed), you can easily wind up with depleted strength before noon. After that, you’re left to either socialize with your neighbors or sleep the day away to fully restore your energy. Story of Seasons’ biggest flaw is its insistence on too literally conveying the world-weary axiom, “There just aren’t enough hours in the day.”

The fruit of your labor is yours to ripen, but it takes time and patience to see your farm in Story of Seasons progress beyond a small patch of unripe tomatoes.

You learn to work within these tight boundaries. After watering your crops and tending to your livestock Monday morning, maybe you’ll spend the next three hours fishing—an activity easy on your stamina—with the hopes of nabbing a rare catch. If it rains on Tuesday and you don’t need to manually water plants (an occurrence you’ll cherish), you can spend the morning selling crops to the merchant visiting the market. From there, you can allot your waning hours of sunlight to chopping down trees to free up additional space for barns, or working the land for all those sweet potato seeds taking up space in your inventory. Once you discover valuable minerals like copper and purchase enough blueprints for new tools, though, the stamina restrictions loosen. By the time I crafted a gold brush and watering can, I was able to attend to almost every errand in a given day without depleting my food bank or splurging at the restaurant.

Unfortunately, digging up dirt and picking up stray branches isn’t fun. In fact, gathering materials and making sure everything on your farm is in tip-top shape before you hit the hay can be an lifeless grind. But even after spending three in-game days doing little more than watering plants and milking cows whilst waiting for a merchant to come to town, the compulsion to continue expanding my empire was strong. After playing a marathon session and with every intention of putting the 3DS down, simply waking up to the pitter-patter of rain against my roof was enough to get me out of my virtual bed and back into the fields. Story of Seasons intelligently doles out new tasks and items that build upon its basic farming mechanics, so it’s easy to just barrel through weeks at a time in anticipation for bigger and better results.

The deliberately paced farm work coupled with the time between planting crops and seeing results only makes cashing in your trove of goods sweeter. A calendar tells which days of the week merchants come into town, and the more you sell, the more unique buyers visit the market. Different items are also in-demand during certain weeks and with particular buyers, so while you might have moaned and groaned as you slaved over dozens of different plants, selling an entire crop of chili peppers at above-market value can turn the whole game around. This sudden influx of cash allows you to lease new land, buy more cows, or even expand your house.

That’s when Story of Seasons is at its best. After spending weeks digging through your couch cushions for enough loose change to simply feed your cows, finally selling your goods and using this influx of money to upgrade each aspect of your agricultural business is wonderfully satisfying. The subsidiary activities, such as fishing, decorating, and (eventually) mining for rare minerals can be entertaining on their own, but they all feed into Story of Seasons’ primary goal—to build the biggest, best farm possible.

Every swing of the axe, thrust of the hammer, or flick of the wrist as you water crops affects your stamina.

Because of how single-minded you can become, it’s difficult to find entertainment outside of the farm. Poking the townsfolk to hear repetitive dialogue is dull, and the planned events that range from cooking competitions to fashion shows feel more like roadblocks during your daily routine than novel ways to interact with your neighbors. Different events through each of the four seasons do well to break up the pace, but every moment you’re not farming can feel like a waste of effort.

One nagging distraction is the frame rate, which noticeably dips as you travel from screen to screen. Story of Seasons isn’t a visual powerhouse, even if the cartoony characters and vibrant colors of the different seasons are nice to look at. But as soon as you step into a patch of land littered with seeds and budding plants, the presentation stutters. It doesn’t prevent you from completing any specific tasks, but the frame rate remains a consistent nuisance.

Even so, Story of Seasons is a wildly addictive, bizarrely rewarding adventure constrained by tight restrictions that only loosen after a significant time investment. The early pacing problems do well to bolster the sense of progression later in the game, and while the restrictive stamina system tempers the fun early on, the eventual payoff for all your hard work is enhanced by the early days spent toiling in the fields. There are blatant issues—some of which might keep you from advancing beyond the first season—but once Story of Seasons has its hooks in you, it’s difficult to walk away from the farm.

"This would be good as a mobile game" was, historically, some pretty faint praise. A sort of euphemism for alleging that a game was baser somehow, that in exchange for a shallow, compulsive high it asked little of a player save the odd microtransaction. Drag a distracted finger across a screen a few times, and kill, conquer, level up…all between stops on the train. I don't cotton to those implications, not anymore: Mobile games have achieved too much, broken too many molds. But in some circles you can still hear the old backhanded compliment being leveled at games like Sid Meier's Starships.

Starships happens to actually be a mobile game--the kind that harks to those days of yore, when "mobile" equated to "simplistic." It released simultaneously on PC, Mac, and iPad, and in more-or-less the same form to boot. And the first things you notice about it are the various ways it seems visually bottlenecked by its tablet version. On PC, it unfurls in a tablet's compacted, low resolution window, and there are no graphical settings to massage. Its sci-fi galaxy is mostly abstracted, and its unit models are simple and blocky. It's not those issues that really put me off of Starships, but rather the way it seems to aspire to that narrow, dated idea of what makes a "good" mobile game. I can turn aside the quick and obvious assaults on PC sensibilities--the rough graphics, the lack of options--but it's the cynical design that guts me, in the end.

The titular starships form a single roving fleet on the game's galactic map, and act as the lone controllable unit. From your home base, the fleet can be moved over to any adjacent planet with the press of a button, which triggers combat missions that award points towards bringing the planet into the fold of your empire. Planets under your control confer resources each turn (food, industrial production, science, and energy) that can be spent on upgrades for your starships, or used towards buildings and world wonders that improve your production or military capabilities. The salient goal is to have a majority of the galaxy under your thumb--51%, and no less.

Where Meier's Civilization series accommodates pacifism, there isn't much to do with your Starships fleet on the galactic map except pick fights. There are victory conditions outside of conquering your opponents, sure--controlling X amount of world wonders or researching Y amount of technologies--but these goals take resources to complete, and the only way to fill your storehouses is to perform combat missions and claim planets. The different victories have different names, but they all boil down to exercising military might, which in turn requires trudging through watered down and grossly exploitable battles.

Combat missions set your ships down on a honeycomb game space surrounding a planet. You might be asked to escort a unit (that, mercifully, you also control), or hunt down an escorted one yourself. Or you navigate a maze of asteroids to reach an escape gate, or defeat an enemy boss. The asteroids strewn about the playing field block fire, and black holes teleport ships to other black holes on the map. It's simplistic board game strategy propped up by only the barest of fiction, and eminently exploitable. Every one of your ships can be upgraded to deploy zippy, surprisingly powerful fighters, meaning that in a single turn it's possible to effectively double the size of your fleet. The fighters are fragile, but they're so strong and can quickly cover so much distance that they throw the balance of any fight. Even forgoing them, I found I was able to comfortably win almost every engagement on any difficulty level by committing to longer range lasers and picking off enemies as they tried to approach, one at a time. It's a strategy game without strategy, enabling you to sleepwalk your way to triumph.

Starships ostensibly picks things up where Civilization: Beyond Earth left off, but practically speaking, all that means is that the preceding game's cardboard cutout leaders have been stood in front of Starship's backgrounds. Each has a unique stat bonus in place of an actual personality, and their speech is characteristically mechanistic. "Our computer calculations indicate that you have but a 19% chance of dominating this galaxy" is what passes for a greeting in the game's stripped-down version of diplomacy. If you're thinking about declaring war after that (and I wouldn't blame you if you were), it's trivially easy to gauge your odds. Your opponents themselves provide an itemized list of their military assets on request--Starships is wanting for any other, more suitable screen to house the information. There are no ceremonial trappings, here. Two deadpan leaders simply meet, compare spreadsheets, and arrange peace or war accordingly.

You're presented with a similar rundown at the end of missions, tabulating all the ships destroyed and lost, and divvying out bonuses multiplied by various modifiers. Starships throws these figures and calculations at you, but there's nothing useful to be done with the information, as though the game just wants to make sure you know that it did the work. Numbers are always going up a thousand at a time in the game--you get lost in all that effortless forward momentum, and it becomes impossible to care about a few lost hundred here or there.

Beyond Earth's Affinities also make the jump, representing a choice between one of three broad societal values: Purity, Supremacy, or Harmony. But like everything in Starships, they've come unmoored from any cultural tie-downs, and now simply denote which of three arbitrary stat bonuses you feel like beginning the game with. Constructing a wonder means pressing a button when you've got enough of the requisite resource. There's no actual sense of building--a variable has simply shifted somewhere behind the scenes. It's an issue exacerbated by the fact that your ships are functionally immortal--though they appear to blow apart when destroyed in battle, you can still simply repair them afterward for a nominal cost. Even the loss of an entire fleet in a mission simply means being sent back to the planet you arrived from, down a few of the action points you expend to move around on the map on a turn. The stakes of this intragalactic war are at mechanical remove--any one defeat amounts only to an obscure amount of wasted man-hours.

As mobile games find new heights, Starships takes its sci-fi premise and uses it to trawl the primordial pools they ascended from. Its planets are suspended in a two dimensional plane, and when your turn is up, enemy fleets dart back and forth among them in seemingly random directions. They look less like interstellar armadas, and more like single celled organisms responding to simple stimuli. They flit about from planet to planet, hex cell to cell, as though guided by the basest biological compulsions, consuming and growing. And you're right alongside them--with a few disinterested clicks or swipes across the screen, killing, conquering, and leveling up.