Review | Farm For Your Life

LifeisXbox’s Farm For Your Life review | Welcome to Farm For Your Life, a brand new game developed and published by Secret Item Games. This strange time management game was released in 2013 on PC and is currently available on all major platforms. In Farm For Your Life, your community was taken down by an apocalypse, caused by a heavy storm, and besides a few survivors, all that remains are ruins and zombies. It’s up to you and the other survivors to rebuild what was lost!

ℹ️ | Maui played Farm For Your Life for 7 hours on Xbox Series X. This game is also available on PC – Nintendo Switch – PlayStation – iOS – Android

What we liked!

• A little something for everyone | Putting together various genres into one game doesn’t always work out. However, every once in a blue moon, putting together different genres seems to be working, creating a game packed with wonderful gameplay. One of the success examples is Farm For Your Life. You enjoy farming? Well, put on your overall, pick up that watering can, gather you seeds, and start launching your farm. Grow tomatos and pumpkins, water them, and take care of your cattle. Oh, you want to feed people and open up a restaurant in the ruins of the old restaurant? No problem! Why not use the ingredients from your farm to create delicious courses. And if you’re not really feeling the whole cooking and serving aspect, just hire someone to do it. Get them a place to sleep, make sure they get one meal per day, and they’ll be your employee. What? You also want something a little more action-related? Let’s throw some tower-defensing into the mix, shall we? Those hungry zombies will come out at night to steal your crops or rob your restaurant, so better throw some tomatoes (or whatever you can miss) at those vegetarian zombie bastards! Or you know, upgrade your terrain with slingshots, corn cannons ans more!
• Currency | Since an apocalypse just took place, money has become rather useless. I am so glad the developers decided to make the most important currency something different than money, becuase it just makes sense! Customers visiting your restaurant will have a few things in their inventory, and depending on what they want to eat/drink, you can choose something from their inventory. Of course, this can be super useful when you need certain items like (electronic) scrap, specific seeds, or maybe an extra plate or glass for your restaurant!
• Restaurant | I already mentioned that Farm For Your Life embraces three important aspects: farming, dining, and tower-defense. Let’s dive a little deeper into the second one. You’ll be managing your own restaurant where you offer people food and drinks. At the entrance, customers can tell you what they want to eat (for example a fried egg and a glass of apple juice), and then you can charge what you want from their inventory. A little screen at the bottom of the screen will show if what you give and what you get are in balance. Of course, people don’t want to be overcharged too much, so it’s important to balance our what you ask for in return for a meal! As you progress in the game, more ingredients will become available so you’ll be able to create extra types of dishes. You’ll first have to purchase the recipe for a new dish from the merchant Alex and then learn how to cook this dish. The process of learning is quite simple really: you just play a Fruit Ninja kind of mini-game and voilà, you can now prepare the new meal. Besides taking order, preparing meals, and getting drinks, you’ll also have to clean the dishes, and of course, expand your restaurant. It can all become quite hectic at some point, so hiring someone to help you out at the restaurant is very recommended!
• Peaceful and endless modes | Besides the regular story mode, there are two extra modes in Farm For Your Life. The peaceful mode is actually an option you can choose to activate at any time during the game. This basically lets you play the game without the tower defense part, meaning there are no zombies roaming around. This is a nice feature for players that prefer focussig on the farming and dining part, but it’s also a welcome option when things get tougher. At one point, everything went to shit for me, and there was nothing but chaos because there were too many zombies. I decided to turn on the peaceful mode for a little while so I could get my shit back together, to then later turn it off again. So helpful, really! Farm For Your Life also offers an endless mode, which, as you can probably guess, is a game mode that allows you to play the game as long as you want (compared to the story which only lasts a few hours). A pop up message does ‘warn’ players that it’s better to first finish the story mode before diving into endless mode.
• Visuals and sound | The first thing you’ll be doing in Farm For Your Life is creating and naming your character. The game offers quite some customisation options. Change your skin color, your hair, and even adjust outfits. The appearance and name of your character can be changed at any point during the game by entering your house, by the way. The overall graphics in Farm For Your Life are good looking. You get a cute cartoonish 3D art style that reminds of games like Farmville but simpler. The NPCs have different looks, and the whole game is very colorful. To accompany you during your farming, dining and defensing, there is a soundtrack that compliments the soothing feeling this games tends to give overall. The necessary sound effects are where they should be, so nothing to complain about here.
  

Somewhere between

• A slow start | I’m going to be honest here: Farm For Your Life did not manage to impress me in the first hour or so. The turorial is dreadfully slow and just takes too long. At one point, I also had to start placing my fence, but it had to be in one exact spot and I spent 15 (!) minutes trying to place it where it had to be, but I think some bug occured because I simply couldn’t. I ended up closing the game, and when I restarted it, all was good and I could just continue placing my fence where I wanted it to be. Anyway, I am here to tell you that even though the tutorial and the beginning totally suck, it does get better! Once you get the hang of everything, and the tutorial is in the past, the real fun begins, and the gameplay becomes quite addictive even. So hang tight!
• Controls | Farm For Your Life has been out on PC for almost 10 years now, and translating a PC game to consoles doesn’t always go very smooth. Unfortunately, this is also the case with this particular game. I can see that navigating the screen might be a lot easier if you have a mouse and keyboard here. Using your shovel, picking something up, watering crops, everything felt a bit more challenging with a controller. It didn’t feel entirely in control the whole time, and more specifically in the beginning I had a lot of trouble working my controller. If you spent a few hours in the game, you’ll get the hang of it eventually, but it remains annoying at times.

What we disliked

• Small bugs | There were some small bugs that I ran into while playing. For example, sometimes the plates and drinks in my restaurant were floating above the ground, and I’m not even sure how they got on the ground in the first place (but maybe that was my employee’s fault and I missed that). Either way, floating plates shouldn’t be happning. One of the NPCs also stopped working for me, and just stood there in my restaurant overthinking his entire life or something instead of providing meals.
• Small text | I’ve always been told that I have pretty good eye sight. Plus I have a TV that is rather big, so when I could not read everything very well on the screen, it was quite annoying. The dialogue wasn’t the problem, it was the indicated amount of items that was barely readable a lot of the time. When crafting items, you need specific items and quantities, and I often had to move closer to my TV screen to see how many, for example, scrap I actually needed. Or how much I had in my inventory. I feel that people who don’t have great sight will have even more problems with this, and this can really tone down the enthousiasm towards the game, I think.

How long to beat the story | 5 to 7 hours
How long to achieve 1000G |
Similar with | Harvest Moon, Plants vs. Zombies

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