Family Farm

Imagine for a moment the feeling of owning your own farm – of working tirelessly to ensure the health of your livestock and crops. At the end of the day you look out to the coming fruit of your labor, to a place you've forged for yourself from nothing. Now imagine you're working for someone else. Sure, you're breaking your back to see a farm flourish, but take away the sense of ownership and it really loses all meaning. That's more akin to what Family Farm can feel like.

It may be that Family Farm suffers from too much structure. The game has a very lengthy mission based mode that tasks the player to sell so much of something, hit a farm value milestone, or meet some other expansion goal within a set number of years. Years compose four seasons, which are in turn the equivalent of one in game day each. Meaning that what you can accomplish in one day will fruit the next, it takes only a day to turn seeds into crops. The game may do instant gratification a little better than most others in the genre.

Custom games are of course a little more open ended, but they‘re also anchored to a set time limit and there’s usually a ceiling of expansion to meet fairly quickly. Regardless, the game feels like you’re working for the attendant family on the farm rather than the other way around. This is a strange complaint to have given how little autonomy the family or hired laborers seem to have. They need your help even to feed themselves.

The UI isn’t terrible, and cosmetically it’s all very well thought out, though as a whole the game doesn’t have the best production values. With cartoonishly ugly character models and fairly bland environments the art at least manages to be colorful and inoffensive. It even manages a little charm in some ways, and the music serves the game well, being all cheerful and quaint.

To be reductive, Family Farm draws mostly to traditional farm management with a little bit of The Sims layered on. Though it’s probably not the most praiseworthy representation of either.