Another week, another sim. This week’s sim allows you to set up your own farm and do farm things, but what’s interesting about Farm Manager World is that you’ve got a decently broad selection of locations to which your game can take you. Your general locations are Europe and Central America with Asia as a future option. From there, Farm Manager World really is an economic agribusiness simulator with a tremendous amount of granular control over your farm. If you’re a big fan of the simulator genre and really love to control every aspect of your sim, Farm Manager World is a solid choice.
Plot Ahoy!
Like most simulators, Farm Manager World’s plot is pretty basic, but your chosen setting will impact what resources you have available to you. Depending on what you choose, you should expect to start with a very basic original setup. It is, after all, up to you to take your small farm to an agricultural empire. Your location also determines some aspects of what will and will not grow well where you are, but the title is pretty balanced in how it approaches those issues. However, it is a consideration when selecting the real estate on which you’ll be starting your farming empire.
Review Notes
Farm Manager World offers you some pretty detailed gameplay. Once you’ve selected your initial location, then, it’s up to you to manage everything from water requirements for your crops to soil pH. You begin with the option to buy the land on which you’ll farm, and you start with a farmhouse-type building. After that, you’ll create a field by highlighting tiles where you want to farm. Note that the cost of upkeep will increase with every additional tile, and you’ll need more workers to farm the area as well.
In fact, that’s where Farm Manager World takes a turn for the familiar. You’ll need to be sure that your active fields are connected to the main roads in order to transport your goods because Farm Manager World is a game in which infrastructure is important. After you’ve made sure you have adequate infrastructure, you’ll pick a crop based on your climate, and you’re off to the proverbial agribusiness races.
As you turn a profit, you’ll be able to expand your holdings by cultivating more fields, getting into animal husbandry, and building more buildings. While doing so, you’ll hopefully see increased profits, but you’ll definitely see increased complexity, especially as you begin balancing the cultivation needs of the various plants and animals under your care. You’ll also dip your toes into the world of food preparation as well given that some prepared products will be more profitable than their constituent raw ingredients. Most of this activity takes the form of fermenting or pickling, so watch out for those options.
You’ll also need to keep an eye on global trends, which is a neat feature in Farm Manager World. I don’t think it’s shocking to hear that the available supply of a given product can affect the demand for it on a global scale, and Farm Manager World capitalizes on that idea. If you raise too much wheat, you can help drive wheat prices down. If there isn’t enough wheat, the prices go up in the title just as they do in real life. If you enjoy min/maxing your sales and really enjoyed gambling on turnip futures in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, this facet of gameplay should be right up your alley.
Despite the subject matter, not everything about Farm Manager World is sunshine and happy crops. The sound design is generally good, but the background music doesn’t really fade into the background. I can easily see how the soundtrack could grate on a player’s nerves. The graphics are pretty solid and are exactly what you’d expect out of this kind of simulator. Most of the farming and other activities require pop-up menus which contain a great deal of information. I’m told that farming in real life requires a lot of spreadsheets, and it certainly does in Farm Manager World. A bit of streamlining for some of these menus would not go amiss.
I’ve mentioned that farming in Farm Manager World can become quite complex. You’ll end up juggling values for greenhouse temperature, soil pH, moisture content, field temperature, etc. It gets to be a lot, especially if you prefer a bit more automation in your simulators. That level of granular control also extends to the logistical systems you create on your farm. The really odd aspect is that you have to sell everything through the storage space attached to your house, so even though you can build silos and barns to your heart’s and bank account’s content, you can’t sell from them. They’re just staging areas until you can move product to that sales site. This seems a bit counterintuitive, especially given that one of the many, many values you need to monitor are product shelf-life and contract timers. That additional step just eats into those values.
Also, bear in mind that Farm Manager World is still in Early Access. While there aren’t many bugs and glitches at the beginning of gameplay, you may run into them as you progress through the campaign.
TLDR
Farm Manager World is a great exercise in near total control over the experience of running a farm, and if you’re the sort of person who craves that kind of granular customization of your gameplay experience, you really should take a look. It offers a wide range of activities, and you can find yourself going down a rabbit hole that lasts for hours. However, there are also some odd choices the developers make that can pull you out of the immersion.
Farm Manager World retails for $19.99 on Steam as an Early Access title.
Stray Thoughts From Behind the Keyboard
- I’m generally a big fan of customization in sims, but frankly, I’m glad that the range of the visual modifications I can make to things in Farm Manager World is more limited. I honestly think that more customizations would lead to decision fatigue.
- The birds around my farmhouse make me wonder if they’re not supposed to be a Halloween feature. So many birds.