Welcome to another YvoCaro Plays!
As always, these blurbs are mainly about the video games I’m currently playing. Unedited thoughts spring up in my mind, mostly game-related, sometimes not. Or a random train of thoughts starting with the game and ending somewhere completely different!
If you like these bits of gaming thoughts, you can find the previous ones here.
Farm Together
When Farm Together 2 hit early access on Steam, Paula and I were pretty enthusiastic to give it a try. We remembered the hit the first game was back in February 2019 when it was released on the Nintendo Switch. That one had already been on Steam since October 2018, and it was a pleasant surprise to see it on our favourite handheld device so soon after.
Remember, this was a time when the Switch could really do with some good simulation games. I remember searching far and wide to find some nice titles to quench my thirst for simulation or farming gaming, and that wasn’t so easy, especially compared to nowadays when we are spoilt for choice, and the words cosy and wholesome are like magic to my ears! The original Farm Together came at just the right time and kept me busy for quite some time.
No Real Interaction
So we happily jumped back onto our tractor for Farm Together 2, a game that is currently on Steam in Early Access.
This is not a review, by the way. Paula already made the review which you can find here. But I wanted to share my disappointment with you, purely based on this: I really hoped the game had made progress with Farm Together 2. After all, six years have passed, and as I mentioned, the audience expects more from their cosy games.
In my review of the first Farm Together game, I remarked:
“What surprised me about Farm Together is this: there is no real interaction. Not with other characters in the game. Not with your animals, you don’t need to brush them or milk them. (I had no idea a cow could make it come out in bottles!). And not with your crafting buildings. It’s a matter of putting things in and picking things up again after it’s been worked on. It’s fine for me, but if you like the socialising part with villagers in Harvest Moon, this may disappoint you.”
Sadly, that is still the way it is now.
6 Years Worth of Changes?
Sure, at first, I was happy to be back on my created farm, and I noted things that had been added with pleasure. There is a town that you can travel to, and open up several stores in. At these stores, you can sell excess produce to a certain amount, limited to the currency the store clerk has to spend. Every now and then, you come across a townie that has a request for you. Nothing intricate, just more of the same as with the quests you do on the farm, so along the lines of “Can you spare me 10 potatoes or 2 fruit salads?”. Overall, though, the town feels lifeless and empty.
The quests that you work on while at the farm are pretty much the same; there’s always only one ongoing. No need to use your management skills to satisfy more requests at once or to cater to more difficult ones. Seasons only last 17 real-time minutes, so even if you can’t currently provide pumpkins, you won’t have to wait too long before you can sow them again.
It’s a pleasant surprise that terraforming is added to your farm, but you can unlock it by first reaching level 30…and that amounts to quite a huge number of hours played.
Makes Me Compare to HayDay
Somehow, playing Farm Together makes me want to check into my HayDay Farm on my tablet. It did in 2019, and it does now in 2024. It’s a game that I put many, many hours into and which has its own annoyances, of course. It’s too commercialized and has bottlenecks that disturb the gameplay (anyone else looking for bolts and planks?). But there’s more interaction in there, more liveliness than in Farm Together 2.
Such a pity, as there is so much potential. I can only hope that, as Farm Together 2 is still in Early Access, changes will be made to make the game better.
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