Farm Together

Genre: Management Sim

Players: 1-4 Co-Op (Local Splitscreen), 2-8 Co-Op (Online)

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Review:

Farm Together is a Farm Management Sim, where you are preparing, planting on, building on, and gradually growing the size of a plot of land for your increasingly evolving farm.

There is something strangely compelling about filling a field with your plant of choice, watering it, and collecting it when it’s ready. There’s something strangely compelling about getting closer to completing a specific growing goal. There’s something strangely compelling about gradually seeing your farm expand. And there is something strangely compelling about this game overall.

It really shouldn’t be something I enjoy as much as I do. The game makes use of a time mechanic where time passes when you’re not playing the game, but it doesn’t pass in real-time in the way that the Animal Crossing games do. You put the game down in the morning, come back in the evening, and you’ll find yourself in a different season, but there’s not any easy predictability to it.

This time mechanic proves to be important because the game also uses a wait mechanic, much as you see in games filled with exploitative microtransactions… that are not present here. It’s almost like they wanted to make this a nasty microtransaction game and somehow forgot the “nasty” part. The only paid DLC here is costume packs that cost a few bucks each.

So you’ll find yourself farming, and either you’ll run out of money, or otherwise want to wait until your crops are ready, and so you’ll just leave the game and maybe play Mario or Zelda for a while, only to come back to it later and play a little more, much in the same way you’d play a game like Animal Crossing only for brief snippets of time. But it adds a bright little note to your day, popping in for a few minutes to check in on your little farm.

The game has other mechanics reminiscent of casual clicker games like Farmville. You can water plants at regular intervals to reduce the wait time for them to develop. There are multiple kinds of currencies earned via different means (which again, surprisingly, the game doesn’t peddle to you as microtransactions). And everything prompts a sort of relaxing repetitive gameplay that’s… again, oddly compelling.

There’s also a fair amount of options here. There are tons of plants, trees, farm animals, flower types, building elements… and not only that, but you’ll need to gradually work to unlock everything, some types of plants can only be planted in certain seasons… it’ll be a while before you get to everything there is in this game.

The game also supports online multiplayer with up to 8 people at a time, wither via specific invite or random strangers, with the ability to place restrictions to keep others from messing up your farm. This is nice to have, but to be honest, I never found myself tempted to play with strangers, and I don’t exactly know anyone else who has the game, so… I can’t really say much about this mode beyond that it’s there.

Graphically, the game looks pretty good. Characters are cartoony, but everything about the environments has nice little details like nice reflections, different environmental effects during different seasons/time of day, and nice little animations when you harvest each different plant.

I’m honestly surprised at how much I enjoy Farm Together. On the surface, it looks like generic casual trash. It has all of the hallmarks of predatory microtransaction-laden games I utterly despise. And yet, despite wearing the trappings of those games, it never actually tries to reach into your wallet, making it clear that those mechanics are all present because the folks behind the game want you to take it slow and play this game a little bit at a time, slowly building up your farming empire bit by bit. And what’s more, the simple process of doing that is so compelling that it’s hard not to love it. For a good, no-pressure, casual game, this is a delightful surprise on the Switch.

tl;dr – Farm Together is a Farm Management Sim that has a lot of the trappings of a microtransaction-filled game, but without the microtransactions. Instead, you’ll find it to have nice, relaxing gameplay that puts the focus on playing the game a little bit at a time and gradually watching your farm grow over time. If you’re cool with that sort of thing, this game could surprise you with how enjoyable it is.

Grade: A-

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2019 Game Awards:

Winner:

Best Game for Kids and Casual Players – This game combines good visuals, great music, and compelling gameplay to make for a casual time-waster that anyone can easily enjoy. This is one of those games that’s a delight to come back to time and again, and I feel like anyone who doesn’t mind a slower-paced game can appreciate it, regardless of their age, and regardless of how much they play videogames.

Most Overlooked – As I write this, Metacritic lists precisely zero reviews for the Nintendo Switch version of this game, with only the Xbox One version getting a Metascore. Given that this was one of my favorite games this year, that’s frankly shocking – this game deserves a lot more love, especially on the platform I feel is best-suited for this kind of casual play where you can just put a few minutes into it at a time.

Runner-Up: Best Music, Best Song – Epilogue (Instrumental Version) by Josh Woodward, Game of the Year

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