MR FARMBOY

A game held back by ambition, possibly burnout, and perhaps even a core inability to fully execute critical mechanics in a genre like this. The game is tile based. You literally edit ground tiles to either grass, sand, paths, or functional tiles like farm plots or animal plots. Workers work designated plots. Ranchers need access to animal tiles and Gathers/ Farmers need access to farm/ plot tiles. Plots need to touch roads and all roads must connect in a supply chain. Simple stuff. I LOVE that planting a crop on a farm tile designates that tile for that crop. Where you're penalized for replanting crops yourself as it costs coins to plant anything other than wheat, workers replant for free! Great system. You're buying the first harvest, and the next pay for themselves unless you plant other crops or redesign your farm. And there is the problem. Design. Want a pretty farm? You do it all by hand, one tile at a time and it's locked to character movement direction including collision. Want to move a house back 1 tile? Pick it up, and oh wait... You're moving a ghost of the building bit the original and hitbox is still there so you can't walk forward 1 tile. Move it somewhere else then pick it up again and move it where needed. Want to place a fence? Select it in your decorations and use your mouse... Oh just kidding. You have to press R to rotate the direction around your character, then place it. Want to remove it? No worries just select it and use your mou- Oh right. Select any decoration (ideally not fence), face it with your character and hold R. For each and every fence. This is a farming simulator game where mouse control is required to pickup and place buildings and interact with buildings, but there is no design mode. There is no box selection, placing and deleting. No easy way to design or more importantly redesign your base unless you go one tile at a time. and it's all based on the physical location of your character. AND dont you DARE CONSIDER DOING ANYTHING ON THE LEFT SIDE OF THE MAP. The menu covers up everything on the left. It doesn't swap sides of the screen, you can't move it or change opacity levels. Can you farm? Yes. Can you create a farm? Yes. Can you modify your farm? Barely. I can not in any way recommend this game even if the core loop is actually fairly enjoyable. Half of a farming sim is designing your farm, ant this seems like an afterthought and the developer said he's done and burnt out. The mouse could be used for all design and removal aspects but here we have a hold R to remove the decoration you are quite literally running your character into. [Edit: It seems the developer *may* be looking into a change to the place/ remove system, but until then my review will decidedly be not recommended]

I really like the concept, but I feel that it was released too early. It feels like a demo than a proper early access game. It runs out of content really fast and has buggy AI, that breaks the automation aspect. At the current state it doesn't worth the money.

This is a good game and I did have fun, but it just isn't a 1.0 and I don't think we should let developers get away with releasing their game from early access when it is clearly not finished. As of writing, here are some of the things, that are fine in EA, but not when its supposed to be fully done: - Controller controls are rough. Things like selecting what to build in the menu being the same button as actually placing it, leading to sometimes placing what was selected before to be built instead of selecting the new menu entry (especially an issue when that leads to you overwriting a crop you just planted and payed for). Navigation in the unlocks tree is confusing, where pressing "down" sometimes moves you right (similarly for other directions). No usage of shoulder buttons to navigate sub-menus. You have to navigate to the different tabs manually to select them. - There are no tutorials or tips. While most is pretty obvious not everything is. Another reviewer talked about animals needing animal tiles, which you will only figure out when accidentally spot the tile in the build menu. - The game highlights new things you have unlocked in the unlock tree until you viewed them. But when restarting the game everything is highlighted again (not a big deal, just not something I expect from a 1.0) - When you plant any crop except wheat (the starter crop), it costs coins to plant them so you need to have money to plant them. But that doesn't seem to be the case for farmers. They can just replant every crop without paying. Why? This makes no logical sense and is (again) never mentioned or explained anywhere. It feels like a balancing decision, where the developer realized that farmers can bankrupt you pretty fast (which I expect would happen if they had to pay), but instead of actually reworking the system to make sense they just silently removed the cost from the farmers and called it a day. - The balancing is pretty off in places. At the start it is good, where you keep unlocking new crops and things like houses and workers are well priced where it feels like an acomplishment to buy them but is totally doable. Then after unlocking about a third of the content, you need to fulfill a request for the kings envoy to unlock more stuff. While this is also a good mechanic, the issue is, that they want WAY too many items (up to 500 of most crops plus wood and stone). Of the 3-4h I played in 1.0 easily halve of it was just working to fulfill their order. In that whole time you don't unlock anything new and just let your workers do their thing and either help out or just wait for the resources to be produced as there is nothing to do except wait. I don't even want to know all the things they want when they come around the second time to unlock the last third of the content. As I said before, this is by no means a bad game or unplayable. If you are ok with playing an EA game pretending to be a finished game then there is fun to be had here. Just set your expectations right.