Got this while looking for a farming sim without story/social gameplay. I went into it thinking I'd do some low stakes farming for an hour or two, and this thing consumed my life for over a month (80+ hours) and provided a much-needed chill/vegout zone. At it's core, it's a goal-driven farming sim for people who enjoy clicking buttons and organizing/decorating things, with useful multiplayer features that allow you to visit and work on other people's farms to gain a boost on your own farm. Fairly granular privacy controls and a well-designed leveling progression create a play-your-way grind-based game that actually doesn't feel like a grind outside the (brutal) holiday events. I'm normally not big on cosmetics but I bought several DLC at regular price and will probably pick up the others in a bundle. I'm sure I'll continue to poke at this a while. Highly recommend.

Basically an idle mobile game but for PC. Spent a few hours on co-op and there's nothing to do other than running around the farm pressing A. No tutorial, you get dropped on a farm that's already got a lot of stuff on it, no clue what to do. The season mechanics don't make any sense, there's nowhere to go in the world, your farm is the only place that exists, no NPCs, just staring at plants until the timer is over and then start all over again. It's a shame because it seemed really cute, the graphics are good and it has a lot of animals, buildings, costumes, the tractor stuff seems pretty cool too, but it really isn't worth the effort getting there.

This game is a perfect example of one that's much more than the sum of its parts, because this game is actually kind of bad and yet I couldn't stop planting crops, picking flowers, hiring farmhands and placing decorations until I had gotten all of the trophies. It's cute, controls well and you can build a huge farm with a large variety of crops. It's charming and cozy fun to drive around in your customizable little tractor and plant carrots and shit. Bright graphics, with changing seasons and moods, and pleasant music just kind of chilling in the background. It's nice.

However, the game itself really doesn't make very much sense at all and kind of sucks on a gameplay design level. The economy doesn't really make sense in various ways, and I don't get for example why you can exchange some currencies but not others, which ends up with you just having an infinite supply of tickets since there is also a lame limit on how many employees you can have and it's much lower than the size of the map. Like I think you can have something like 25 farmhands for 50 farm zones. The game is also way too realistic in how you have to have a net worth, basically. You earn money slowly by re-investing almost everything in new crops, so you're constantly semi-broke but rich in theory. Can't just blow your cash when you're at higher levels either, because the jumps in crop cost and value is so high. Low-end crops become entirely useless, so you have to stay locked into investing and waiting forever. What're you gonna do with a 20 gold carrot when the next upgrade is 47 million?

Worse than that, the wait times for nearly everything seems designed for mobile play. You know, the type where you plant an 8-hour crop in the morning on the commute to work and then check again on the way home. The shortest wait time for a reasonable crop with decent earning potential is 30 minutes. Oh, and farmhands can't work fields because they can't plant seeds. Who wants a PS4 game to work like that? Having to get up before work in the morning to spend 20 minutes planting crops, or having it take years to complete the game because everything's so slow? I feel like people who just want to decorate and spend time on their farm for months wouldn't have minded a faster pace for us gamers that just kinda want to burn through it, because the farm is huge and even with better gains, it would take forever to fill all that. That's the next problem though; even with a few DLC packs, there aren't anywhere near enough decorations, which seems quite odd. Isn't making a bunch of simple little 3D objects that aren't especially detailed the easy part? Why aren't there even color options for things? That, I know, is basically the easiest thing to do in a game dev project, but we didn't get it here. It's like you get one blue flag and shut up if you like yellow. Why?

Yet, I couldn't stop playing! It is, after all, charming and cozy fun to plant your carrots and shit. Drive your little tractor around and listen to pleasant music. Put down some decorative pillars and build a hedge maze. Play some piano, paint a pretty pink flower and pick a few hundred actual flowers with your baller red tractor. While being mildly annoyed that nearly every actual game system is just kind of wrong.

Look, okay, I know it sounds bad on paper. Also, it's kinda bad in practice for an hour or so. Yeah, I know there's not a lot to chew on here, that it's just 3D Farmville without the microtransactions, that on some consoles it runs like hot garbage.

Sometimes you just need a stress ball, alright? For me, I gotta feel like there's some kind of long-term planning, so I can't just fire up an aim trainer or Minesweeper or [third example].

This game is very carefully tailored to the person who wants to:
1. Create a personalized cartoon farm for its own sake.
2. Repeatedly return to the game at their own pace and have their dedication rewarded with constant progress.
3. Play a stress-free hangout game with their friends without needing to schedule a game night. No advanced mechanics, no fail states.

Because this game is married to real-life timers, the early game suffers badly. You've picked up a new game and this is likely to be the peak of your interest in it, only to find that you can't do very much because you're short on money and the crops you can plant right now don't make very much. If the aforementioned design goals don't sound like you, you're probably going to bounce off this thing right here. Sorry! There's no catch, it's not a "secret masterpiece" that asks you to push past the tedium. What you see at hour 2 is what you get at hour 200, just on a smaller scale.

Mechanics:
What I've learned to admire about it in the past week of playing with a newbie is the way each element of the game contributes to an ever-shifting economy. There are five main sources of income - Fields, Trees, Animals, Flowers, and Fish. Each income source strikes its own balance between required effort, payout, and frequency, and since each crop has its own level, crops can scale differently as you go - something that has excellent gold per minute at the start may be quickly outpaced if you show a little dedication to a lesser crop. There is no wrong choice - you will always be rewarded, but efficiency freaks will always have something to consider.

The other reason why this works is that different functions use different currencies. I know we're all exhausted by hearing "currencies" in the plural, but this actually serves a gameplay function. Gold is used for crops, diamonds are used for cosmetics, medals are used for major convenience upgrades, and tickets are used for automation. The mention of "crop levels" might have caused some to wince, but it allows for this evolving sense of progression where animals seem like a huge money pit for a new player, but their products convert nicely into tickets that make larger farms easier to run. Second example: Trees fall off very quickly as gold generators, but late-game trees start yielding rarer resources like spices instead, keeping you from bulldozing your orchard.

Quests ensure that you'll always have several plates spinning to meet their diverse needs, but since there are no time limits and no fail states, you can straight up ignore all of this and just let your kid walk around in splitscreen planting whatever they like, ignore the thing for ten minutes/a day/three weeks and come back to show them the fruits of their labor.

What I will say regarding the economy is that some crops do become functionally useless as time goes on - the game rewards you so much for unlocking new crops that the oldest ones cannot possibly scale enough to compensate. Everything gets better with dedication, but once you've made enough progress to unlock 2000-profit-per-seed chard, you probably don't care about the 15 profit lettuce, and your farm is likely too large to benefit from its fast grow time since you've got other stuff to do.

Conclusion:
It's not a lot, but there's value in it. It's good for kids, it's good for chilling in a Discord call and chatting, it's good for when you're slightly too high and staring at your Steam library like you're sorting a to-do list. I know it shares an aesthetic with 500 different App Store games called some shit like "Harvest Heroes" but you gotta trust me on this one! It's me, your Backloggd friend! Let's hop on a voice call together and plant leeks for six hours straight! Please help me harvest leeks