FARM MANAGER 2018 Game Review

 Farm Manager 2018 is one of the best farming simulators you can find in the digital stores, well.. and physical ones normally. They didn't even change it that much with new games, until 2021 version. That's how good it is. But we must get deeper into that, because we have some things to warn you about, and some compliments to make about the game. Let's get started!

Farm Manager 2018 is a farming simulator where you can do pretty much the same things for hours and not get bored. Plant and harvest in your fields, farm in your greenhouses, and slaughter animals, to make some profit. If you are a vegan though, worry none, they have a game mode for that as well, just play that one, nice touch. There are tons of things I loved about it, but one of the most amazing things about it was the graphics if you ask me. Well they're not from other planets or something, but they're overall quite impressive if you don't zoom in. Don't zoom in. Game mechanics are mostly easy to understand over a short time spent in the game, and the UI is simple enough. The idea behind small things, rules if I may, is pretty. They make sense at most, like the crops needing to be picked up, instead of vanishing like other farm sims. 

I liked the economic balance a lot, it's challenging, but not that hard to keep track about. The economy page on the buttom bar helps you understand how you're going and has some cool features like reports for a single production and etc. Although, economy has some flaws as well, strawberry, raspberry and red pepper is always more profitable, so much that there's no point in growing most of the others. In my 50 hours first playthrough, I didn't grow a watermelon once, cos simply it makes no sense. Also, slaughterhouses do break the economic balance of the game at most part. They're over profitable, and way too easy to function. You just buy cows for a fixed price, and sell their meat right away, automatically. It's like a money generator with no flows.

I loved the automation effort they put in the game. You can automate most of the in game actions. Fields, cow sheds, chicken coops, they all work on their own if you invest in automation, which is awesome. And for the better, you can sell your stuff automatically as well, so you can both farm and sell what you harvested for example. With automation, and help of your machines you'll get rich baby!

A thing I didn't like would be settings. The game does offer a few settings, even though they change basically nothing. The graphics quality option is just an option. The very high quality looks exactly the same as normal one. Also, I hated those bugs and problems happening over and over. Esc doesn't work, mouse is not visible, fail in saving games, all of these can sometimes happen, and there's nothing much you can do about it. There are solutions of course, for all. We have a post on this matter as well.

Still though, they're not fixable for good, they will just keep happening and you'll keep trying to fix them. It's irritating and takes away the joy at some points. One other minus would be the optimization. There's nothing much to say, the game literally stutters time to time. The laggy engine work is a minus, using over 50 worker at once tires your PC out. We played this game on 16gb ram, 4 gb Nvidia Gtx 1650 ti card, with a 10th gen intel i5 4 core processor, which looks like a solid setup for this game, but trust me, nothing is enough in Farm Manager in case of running it smoothly. And at last, and again, we must note that the game is overall poorly optimized, and the updates to solve that seems to be inefficient.

 Summing up, even with the irritating bugs and overall laggy gameplay, Farm Manager 2018 is a perfect time killer, and a unique experience. Not a must have in general, but for this price, definitely a should have!

Reviewed By: Batu

VideoMortals Rating : 7/10