Farm Tycoon

Genre: Management Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Farm Tycoon, released on Nintendo Switch in 2022, appears to be an adaptation of the Farm Manager series of games on PC, games which have players building and managing a farm much in the same style as players manage a city in the Sim City series.

The presentation has been somewhat scaled back from the Farm Manager games here. Rather than using 3D visuals, Farm Tycoon makes use of 2D images seen from an isometric view. This works well enough – everything has a neat, clean look to it, and I can definitely get a sense of satisfaction from seeing a bustling farm going about its working day. These visuals are paired with some good farm animal and construction noises, and backed by a lovely, relaxed acoustic soundtrack that fits the game perfectly.

The gameplay here is a fairly simple matter of deciding the placement of facilities, assigning workers, and deciding what to buy at the local market. The menus take some getting used to, but once you do it’s all mostly straightforward. This is somewhat more complex than a typical farming game – to grow crops on soil, for example, you need to designate an area as a field, and then till, cultivate, and fertilize the field, buy seed, plant the seed, water, and eventually harvest, possibly also requiring a space set aside for storage of said crop. And each of these steps requires you assign workers to carry out these actions. There are similar processes for every function on your farm, and remembering what everything does and what it needs can be quite demanding.

Wait, why did I just scratch out the above paragraph? Because unfortunately you’ll never get far enough for all of that to matter. That is because Farm Tycoon is unfortunately broken, and as a result I found it to be unplayable.

How is it broken? Well, through the course of playing the game’s campaign, I got to a step where I was instructed to prepare a facility for silage. Well, I’m not sure what silage is, exactly, but I did as I was instructed, following the commands as they were given to me by the game’s helpful tutorial. Unfortunately, those commands didn’t work. For whatever reason, the game decided to outright ignore me when I told it to start using the designated facility to create silage, leaving me stuck indefinitely.

Feeling that perhaps this was a fluke, I restarted the game over from the beginning. This time, I managed to get past this part with the silage, doing all the same things I did in my first playthrough. Odd, but perhaps this was a one-off incident. Unfortunately, when shortly afterward I was instructed to buy chicken feed, I did so only to find that the game refused to register my purchase.

Well, the way I see it, once could be a fluke, but the game screwing up on me like this twice in short succession? That’s a design flaw, and one so fatal that as I said, it leaves the game unplayable.

It’s a shame too, because without this flaw, I rather liked Farm Tycoon – the presentation is nice, the mechanics seems sensible enough, and while there are tons of farming games on the Nintendo Switch, there aren’t really any top-down Management Sims in this style that I’ve encountered prior to this. However, if I’m wanting a game along these lines, it appears I’ll have to keep looking, because this game is a broken mess that can’t even seem to make it out of the beginning tutorial without failing miserably. The result is a game that I cannot recommend. Go with something like Stardew Valley istead – it’s not the same thing, but at least it actually works.

tl;dr – Farm Tycoon is a Management Simulation where players build and manage their own farm. Or at least they would do that if this game wasn’t so broken that it inevitably fails to register commands at some point within the first hour or so of playing it. If this game got fixed, it might be a pretty decent entry in the genre, but as-is, it’s virtually unplayable.

Grade: F

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2022 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Worst Game, Most Overpriced ($20)

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