Farm Your Friends Review (PC)

Do you know how they say that you need to break a few eggs to make an omelette? Well, as it turns out, you also need to break a few friendships to make it in the agricultural world, too. In Farm Your Friends, crops don’t necessarily grow with fertilizer and rain; they grow on another farm—a plot of land where, as much as it pains its landowners to harvest, you must steal from to make ends meet. There are defenses in place for such situations—scarecrows, electric fences, and other barbaric traps, for example—that prevent you from committing such unlawful acts. But that isn’t what this eight-player online PvP is about. This isn’t somewhere for fledgling farmhands to collaborate and build from the fat of the land; it’s a war zone of cattle and hay, tomatoes and scarecrows—a battlefield in which only the strongest can thrive.

Farm Your Friends isn’t your typical cozy farming simulation game; it’s a fast-paced forage-and-farm competitive experience that invites eight players to join an acre, and battle it out to harvest the most crops and earn the highest possible score. As one of these aspiring farmers, you have the opportunity to steal, cheat, and make impulsive decisions to achieve your goals, whether it’s by utilizing traps to defend your farm, or cutting corners to fast track the harvest. Herein lies the ultimatum: protect your crops, or fight to abolish them from an opposing yard.

At the heart of this PvP is a familiar strand of fertilizer—a winning ingredient that, if used correctly, can elevate even the smallest seeds into flourishing crops. It’s early days yet, though, so while we can’t judge the whole harvest, we can talk about its humble roots as a genuine competitor in the field.

Farming’s a Fool’s Game

Farm Your Friends’ eight-player arena style isn’t a blueprint that we haven’t already seen a handful of times before. It isn’t drastically different from, say, Overcooked, in ways. Excluding the fact that you need to sell crops and not whip up ten-second delicacies for hungry patrons, the game itself plays out in a similar fashion. To begin with, you have a small portion of land, a treasure trove of resources, and the simple goal of having to harvest enough crops to flip a profit. If it was just that, then it wouldn’t be a difficult task. But that’s where Farm Your Friends tries to infuse its own spice into the mix.

A PvP battle at its core, the game takes every possible opportunity to knock the apple cart, so to speak, with natural disasters—zombie raids, shark attacks, and hazardous weather, for example—all playing a role in the grand scheme of things. And there’s a lot going on here, with not just undead hordes and destructive glaciers wreaking havoc on your plot of land, but also with several other players all duking it out to drive a wedge between your progress and their own. Suffice it to say that there is something of a steep learning curve to all of this — not with the mechanics, as such, but with the amount of moving pieces that you need to come to grips with. But that’s all part of the fun…right?

Potato Thieves

If history has taught us anything about theft in the medieval era, it’s that severing the hands of a potato-picking thief is a justified response. Having spent a good amount of time nurturing potatoes, and having them stolen from my yard, I can sort of understand where the authorities were coming from back then. Given that a great deal of your time is spent defending your allotment from robbing ne’er-do-wells, the most common activity here is, well, deploying strategic defenses to help keep bad trash from sabotaging your progress. A bit of a pain in the neck, I’ll admit. That said, with a good selection of options to experiment with and the aid of an ever-shifting game board that frequently leans into inexplainable catastrophes, it is still an absolute blast to learn. A headache, but worth the trouble, nonetheless.

There a few maps to choose from here, with the most important one being the general farmyard. Aside from that, Farm Your Friends also includes a plethora of themed areas, including an icy glacier, a haunted graveyard, a tropical island, and even a candy-coated paradise. Granted, none of these maps necessarily change the rules of the game, but they do, on the other hand, offer unique characters, events, and possibilities to evolve your farm. And quite frankly, they all look fantastic, with each biome offering a cozy yet weirdly chaotic tone that makes Overcooked look like a lackluster mess of porridge and pumpkins. That’s a major plus in my book: the attention to detail that comes with even the most forgettable maps.

Verdict

Farm Your Friends is just as chaotic as I expected it to be. And I’ll be honest, while I am still kicking myself over the lack of consideration my peers had for my own harvest, I am still as equally grateful for that opportunity to avenge the loss of the yield that I had been given in return. I’ll admit, I probably made more enemies than I did friends during my time behind the wheel, but that was the sort of baggage that I came to expect from something like Farm Your Friends. And yet, even with all of those brief online feuds that I voluntarily endured, it never struck me as being a frustrating experience.

If it’s a love letter to Overcooked that you want, or perhaps just a mindless PvP battler that doesn’t dare take itself too seriously, then you ought to consider jumping into the agricultural realm of Farm Your Friends to get your hands dirty for a few hours. It won’t cost you an arm and a leg to participate in, but it will, however, act as the kindling for a restless feud that will likely result in an inescapable morbid grudge against farming. Can’t win ‘em all though, I suppose.