Farm Land

Genre: Idle Game

Players: 1

.

Review:

Farm Land is an Idle Game released on mobile devices in 2021 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2023. This game has players planting crops, tending to them, and selling the produce, and using the profits to hire workers, upgrade facilities, and buy access to even more land.

The presentation here falls in line with countless other mobile games using simple, colorful 3D visuals with characters represented by 3D stick figures. At the very least, this game does offer a nice, relaxed soundtrack.

The gameplay here is simple, just having you move your character to wherever there’s a task needing to be done, sometimes having to press A. At that point, your character will do whatever it is based on context. Wash, rinse, repeat until you have enough money to buy the next thing and expand what you can do… then start the pattern all over again.

As Idle Games go, this works, is fairly simple, and always provides you with something to do rather than making you wait (though if you want to do a particular thing, you can spend a premium currency to speed things up), with the Nintendo Switch version not having the option to buy this premium currency, though there are a bunch of paid expansions you can buy. My biggest complaint here is that the game doesn’t let you know what’s on a parcel of land until you buy it, and doesn’t let you know the unlock conditions to hire more workers. You just have to keep buying things until you get whatever you want, which is frustrating. For that matter, you don’t really get to make any choices here apart from what to spend your time working on – you won’t be able to decide the layout of your farm, what your workers are working on… it’s all just up to the game.

Still, does Farm Land work, as a game? Is it compelling? Well, yes, in the same way any well-made Skinner box is compelling – number go up, brain make happy. If you’re just looking for a way to keep yourself occupied doing something and get those dopamine hits every time you “accomplish” something, Farm Land is good at doing so. But given how little actual choice you have in doing anything, I feel like this game is doing the bare minimum that an Idle Game should aim for, and not much more than that. And while it is quite effective at doing that bare minimum, it is still the bare minimum.

tl;dr – Farm Land is an Idle Game that has players planting crops, selling the produce, hiring workers, and buying access to more land. This is an effective Skinner box, but it doesn’t do much more than that, since you have very little in the way of meaningful choices to make here. Still, I suppose if you’re just looking for something to kill some time, this game will more than suffice.

Grade: C+

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