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.
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.