Welcome to our review of Professional Farmer, out now on Nintendo Switch. Do you have what it takes to be a virtual farmer?
Get ready for the rural lifestyle! Professional Farmer is set on your own farm. Enjoy the life of a farmer with all its amazing tasks and challenges. Drive your original vehicles, cultivate your fields, take care of your animals and market your product! Different seasons and weather conditions guarantee realistic game fun.
Learn from your experiences as a farmer, use your knowledge to enjoy the satisfaction a farmer feels when sitting in front of the fireplace in a beautiful farmhouse after a hard day’s work. Your efforts will be rewarded – the better your fields are tilled, the more animals you breed, the more products you produce, the better the income available for new machines, larger fields, and tractors. Get ready for the ultimate farming fun!
This game is incredibly promising on paper, but I will be straight up, it has some downsides and I will do my best to be as positive as possible. First up, this game is actually quite realistic in many ways. You get to drive around fields, herd sheep and raise pigs. You also got the financial side to managing a farm and so much more.
After a very lengthy tutorial, which is a good thing, you are thrown into the “game” itself. I use the term game rather loosely here, it is more like a real life simulator. Upon entering the game, you got to start managing the farm and basically out of nowhere chose what you will be doing. This is quite possibly the most disappointing point of the game. If you skipped on the tutorial, you’d be left in a farm without a single clue on what to do.
No clue at all really, do you get into a tractor and drive around or do you explore the terrain first, I will leave all this up to you to find out. It’s well worth the effort to have a look around though. But at that same time, the first imminent bug hits you in the face, the dog follows you everywhere, regardless of your physical location.
I decided to include a screenshot with the dog physically inside the tractor engine with its head sticking out. I did not do this to mock the game, just to make everyone realise there were some issues in an otherwise fine game when it came down to graphics. Sure, it is not overly accurate, but that never seems to be the point of a game like this. The management features are all working fine for my lengthy gameplay.
My advice is not to do too many things at once and do spread out your time to run the place. You will easily get overrun with things to do. Almost every real-life sim game I played so far, takes time to get used to the rhythm and Professional Farmer is no exception.
As Professional Farmer is a very specific genre, I can imagine many gamers just ignoring it when they see it on shelves in game stores. I am pretty much the same to be blunt. Games like this, I am always curious to see what they improved upon and I never buy them because of the variety of other great games on the Nintendo Switch. This is also where my advice and article ends. I would only recommend buying the game if there is no other game that grabs your attention.
Professional Farmer is not that good and it got a little tedious at times. Sadly though, I did fully enjoy learning all the mechanics in the tutorial and even at first, I was enjoying the game. Delving deeper into it, it became more like a chore and before I knew it, I was being annoyed by something that happened 10 minutes later, I decided to end my review time with the game.
If you are into the genre, I am sure you will enjoy it, but honestly, I did only like it at first and I ended up giving it a failing score…