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John Deere American Farmer

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 a...
Jack of All Games :: john :: deere :: american :: farmer :: jack :: of :: all :: games :: games :: simulations :: johndeereamericanfarmer :: John Deere American Farmer