Seemingly a pretty barebones system that unfolds beautifully as you play any mode other than the default 1v1 duels. These alternate modes take the little dance of one-hit-kill ducking, dodging, and shoving and ask that you apply all of them to create situations where you "fight fairly" as infrequently as possible - pushing enemies into one another, ducking under an enemy's attack that then hits their ally, deliberately whiffing an attack so that the blood on your sword flies into their face, blinding them. You pick up the basics during the 60-second tutorial, and everything afterward is about feeling out your playstyle and refining the execution: learning when you can punish a greedy attack with a similar greedy defensive option, learning to bait out and punish a charge attack, etc. There's a large list of games that could leave you with deja vu (people have mentioned Bushido Blade, Nidhogg, Hotline Miami, Sclash) but I'm not here to dock points for a familiar premise when the game delivers on its promise like this.

keeping this one short because i'm roughly 20 years older than this game's most devoted fans and i very much doubt they're combing this site for reviews

when i wrote about the original game i mostly did so to highlight the ways in which the game is careful and considered instead of merely being 3d farmville and i'm pleased to report that's still the case here, but farm together 2 is closer to a major update than it is an entirely new game. it is extremely conservative for a sequel. the average player will wonder what the point of this is, but the newbies will like this one more than the first one and there's a lot of QOL stuff for the true devotees. a lot of ways in which the first game could be a little weird / ugly / have clunky menuing have been smoothed out here and while i think pulling a city folk and adding a town is a bit silly, it fixes things like half your farm being covered in hideous trucks and shops and storage facilities to convert your 10 million clownfish corpses into diamonds. that's the kind of change you're looking at, things that do meaningfully affect systems, but their impact is felt most strongly in the long-term and doesn't make for nice, neat selling points - at least, not at this stage. if there's anything of note for casual players it's that they've turbocharged the early game, allowing you to operate at scale quickly instead of nursing 5 lettuce plants for 10 real-life hours.

if you're gonna buy one of the games in this series, buy this one. if you already own the first one, then wait a bit. holding off on rating this one until i've seen a bit more, but i expect to revisit this later once its had time to grow into its own thing