John Deere American Farmer Description:

John Deere American Farmer review:
3 stars (Great potential, needs polish) - While this game is a lot of fun for the first few days, I found myself bored by the end of the week. The farming gets very repetative and tedious.



Your family members have a poorly designed morale system. They get tired of doing the jobs very quickly, and to boost morale you must buy some "leisure" items (such as a swimming pool or a trampoline) and they can't use them. Instead, you let the family member stand there for a long (...long) period of time and their morale recovers. No matter how many leisure items you have it doesn't seem to replenish morale quickly enough. You can hire employees which don't have morale, but they are moderately expensive, and not that smart -- which brings me to AI:



The artificial intelligence for the people in this game needs work. They will often take the longest route from point A to point B, wasting valuable time (you are on a time constraint to plant and harvest your crops). You can't always get them to stop doing a task you've given them, either. On several occasions when having workers operate the combine (the machine that harvests the crops), after they have harvested the field you can't give them a new command because the old one to harvest the field is still active for some reason and the task wouldn't cancel. To fix it I had to fire the employee and rehire him/her.



There are a number of bugs in this game that aren't too bad. Mostly, this game has a lot of irritations. The camera gets very old extremely quick, the AI needs a lot of work, you can only assign one task per employee at a time (there's no queue), the windows and menus have annoying (but easy) navigation, the time goes by too fast even on the slowest setting, you have to store all of your equipment out on the field because there's no garage or anything for them -- so finding your equipment can be a chore. And the one thing that bothers me the most is the cursor. It's a little slow and difficult to control, and you can't adjust it in the game options.



I would recommend passing this game up and waiting for a sequel or a sorely needed patch.
4 stars (If a farmer fun, but not realistic.) - This game is a lot of fun if your a farmer. But its got some things missing in it. Like you can't do haywork, or spread dry fertilizer, or chop corn for silage, or cut oats and bail straw, or no till your corn, and most of the names of the machinery you buy aren't right, or if you don't have enough time to cut your beans or shell your corn ect. in time you can't go on into Nov. or Dec., and lots of other stuff is missing. In real life farming is a lot more fun than this game makes it seem. But it is a great game for people who don't have any experience with farming.
1 stars (Disappointed Dirt Clod) - Don't waste your money. I bought this hoping it was a modern, more appealing take on the old sim farm. My 4 year old loves John Deere and I thought he would enjoy playing it. Nope. The interface is too complicated and filled with tedious tasks for a kid to stay interested - Seems you spend most of your time getting people in and out of vehicles, which would be great if it were an equipment simulator, but it is not. Too many selections are needed to access regular tasks like hiring crop dusters or checking market trends. The only positives are that the graphics and animation are better and there are more choices in equipment. But overall the game is incredibly tedious. There is no way to schedule tasks in advance (a great feature of sim farm). You can miss your planting or harvesting windows if one of your dolt employees wanders off. I don't want to buy more land as I cannot even fathom the aggravation of getting crops planted and harvested in more than 6 fields. The 4 available crops are a joke. Sim farm had 20 or more. As others noted, you really the ability to assign workers specific tasks - You can lose half a season if one wanders from the veggie plots to clean a barn on the other side of the farm - especially since in the process they will avoid any vehicles! You also need a pause option where you can assign several workers tasks, instead of losing valuable time trying to find out where Clem wandered off to. Where are the equipment sheds? What self respecting farmer will leave a 300,000 combine sitting in the rain? Finally, I truly expected many more equipment choices given the John Deere headline. Maybe even a dealership where I could go test drive, after all, the dinosaur sim farm let you fly the crop duster. This is the first John Deere toy I've ever bought that was a disappointment. Maybe they should have given Ertl a crack at it.