The Last Farmer - Review
Geekon are a games developer that usually publish the type of janky simulator games that I, for some reason, enjoy immensely. Their resume includes games such as Parking Tycoon : Business Simulator, Cyber Internet Club Simulator and Bootlegger’s Mafia Racing Story, as far as finding information on the studio itself, that proved to be a hard task as they don’t seem to have a website, so for now their story will have to remain a mystery.
The Last Farmer, is to my knowledge, the first time that Geekon have attempted to make a survival game, given that the post-apocalyptic/survival/crafting/base building genre is so overcrowded with games that are asset flips and cash grabs I am always wary of indie developers with a history of janky games stepping into this area. In The Last Farmer you play as farmer in Texas in a world where civilisation has long since disappeared and zombies now roam the Earth, and it is your task to build a farm and bring some of the worlds former glory back.
When you are first dropped into the game you will stumble across an abandoned garage nearby with a broken-down car inside, repairing this car will serve as your first main task in the game and you will need to find tires, a steering wheel and the engine to get the car running again. You will also need to build plots to plant and harvest vegetables by using water and fertiliser and build up the defences around your base so that you can keep the zombies out when they come knocking. You can use existing structures as bases or even choose to build one from scratch if you so desire, either way you will need to harvest materials from trees and existing structures in order to create the tools you require and as per most survival games you have different tool benches at your base that are used for different crafting purposes, some of these are available right at the start of the game and others you will have to repair before you can use.
The crafting system is all fine and good but when it comes to base building there was never a point in the game where I found this absolutely necessary, apart from building plots to grow vegetables, there is also no point to building gates and walls around your base to keep the zombies out as they are very flimsy and the zombies seem to smash them down within a few hits so it becomes tedious repairing and rebuilding your defences. You have a hunger, thirst and sleep meter that you need to keep your eye on to ensure that you remain well fed and rested and also a health meter that will diminish if you get hit by zombies, if you have played any type of survival game before then none of this will come as a surprise to you.
The map itself is surprisingly large which is why you will want to get the car fixed up as soon as possible as it will make the map easier to traverse, the landscape itself though is very sparse and repetitive though, I do understand that the game is set in the middle of rural Texas but there is just not enough diversity in the design of locations to really keep anybody interested, the same goes for the items you can scavenge from the locations around the map, they mostly consist of food, drink, cloth, wood and metal with very little variety in what you can loot, after a few hours it got to the point that I couldn’t even be bothered exploring most locations as there was just nothing enticing enough to even make me bother wasting the time doing so. There are various survivors and traders placed around the landscape and some of these people will want you to do quests for them before they will trade with you but these quest designs are very unimaginative and the game doesn’t even really have a quest log system to help you remember what each person wants from you which is a huge design oversight.
One of the main challenges of building of a survival game is creating a gameplay loop that keeps you engaged and rewards you for gathering resources and exploring different areas, The Last Farmer fails to do this and the gameplay loop just becomes a tedious chore of gathering the same few resources over and over again to the point that most of the time I felt like the only reason I was gathering items was solely to keep my thirst and hunger meters topped up. The zombies themselves don’t pose much of a problem either and seem to just randomly lurch toward you in a straight line whenever they spot you, making them easy pickings.
The farming itself is not very involved and basically just involves you building planters and animal pens and harvesting resources for food and then planting them again. The post-apocalyptic survival genre is so overcrowded with games that to stand out from the pack you really need to build some new mechanics and gameplay loops into your design for it to become a success, unfortunately, in this case The Last Farmer is the result of what you would get if you typed ‘7 Days To Die’ into the Temu search engine and unwrapped what was delivered.
The Score
4.5
Review code provided by Midnight Works
The Pros
Being a farmer in a post-apocalyptic world is an interesting premise to design a game around
The Cons
Map design is uninspiring and because of this exploration becomes tedious.
No co-op gameplay
Graphics are poorly designed and reek of an asset flip
No quest log system and quests are badly designed and uninspiring
Constantly repairing base defences is tedious
Most of the gameplay loop feels like a chore
