Farming Life Gameplay Preview

Farming Life is a pretty involved farming sim. Almost every task needs to be micromanaged and this will appeal to the gamers looking for a more hands on sim. However, how the game handles the worker AI is incredibly frustrating and may cause broken monitors, player discretion is advised.

Farming Life is a pretty involved sim, unlike most management sims. You must micromanage almost every task, and I do mean almost every task. For example, there is a cat and a dog on the farm. They must be fed, cleaned, and healed or else your farm will be overrun with vermin. However, you can’t just assign a person to take care of them, you must manually assign the feed, clean, and heal tasks individually. This is just one example. The game does alleviate the care of the pets by letting you dump food into their respective bowls.

The most frustrating task by far is selling your produce. You must go collect the produce you want from the silo, bring it to the car, drive the car to a grocer, sell the produce, and then drive back. There are some bugs I ran into during this process that made me want to punch my monitor. For starters, even though a worker’s action queue may be empty, I assign them the list of tasks required to sell the produce. Halfway through the queue, the worker will return to their original job. This is infuriating. You have reclear their queue, and reassign whatever task you wanted them to complete.

I also ran into a few bugs during this process. The option to automatically sell the produce and return does not work. The worker will drive the car to a grocer and simply return. Also, trying to park in a store lot is very inconsistent. I ran into a moment where the AI would pull up into a parking space, pull out, drive towards the home, and then drive back towards the store and repeat the process a couple of times. Very frustrating.

Despite these moments, my monitor did survive unharmed. I actually enjoy the game between my bouts of hell induced rage at the sheer stupidity of the AI. The fact that you have so much control over the game and can micromanage your units to a great degree is appealing to me as you have greater control over how efficiently your farm runs. The game is also very generous in terms of the difficulty. It’s very easy to get a large farm going. Easy if you can survive the frustrating parts that is.

Overall, Farming Life is a game that I wanted to hate but I ended up tolerating. It’s a love hate relationship. The frustratingly broken worker AI and minor bugs coupled with some actually fun gameplay make for an experience. Whether it is good or bad experience will be up to you. And your monitor.