About Lawn Mower Simulator:
This is a fairly decent sim game, but it’s lacking in many ways. $30 is steep for the state of this game and the lack of content. Probably the most disappointing part of this game is the progression. Progression This is a broad overview of the types of progression you can make in this game. Mowers Probably the most disappointing part of the game. More expensive mowers don’t equal more efficient mowing. The most expensive mowers are larger and can be more of a pain to operate than just going with a cheaper Zero Turn. All mowers also suffer from the cutting blades being bogged down by thick patches of grass. Even though you have this heavy duty mower at your disposal, it still gets bogged down just as often as the basic mowers. They have more speed which is more of a curse than a benefit in most cases. Better be light with the throttle or you’ll unrealistically damage your engine and leave patches of grass. HQ More like a menu simulator than an actual HQ. You can’t visit this place, but you can purchase better HQ’s which grant more bays to store your mowers. You can also upgrade your HQ to have more bays before purchasing the next tier of HQ that has even more bays. Employees At the time of review, you can have up to 4 employees. You assign them before you tackle your own job and they complete their work at the same time you do. You can also train each employee (at a cost) to upgrade their stats to make them more efficient. I personally have not seen much benefit in upgrading their stats, because as you level them up, their pay increases, but previous jobs you have done stay at the same rate. Doesn’t seem to scale very well unless you’re always getting the higher paying jobs queued up. RP This is your reputation. This levels up as you complete jobs, spend money on Marketing, and also stacks with employees completing jobs. As your reputation increases, the more valuable jobs start popping up. Controls Big oof here. The biggest problem is the lack of sensitivity sliders and button mapping. It’s 2021, there’s no excuse for not having the ability to customize my controls. The lack of Thrustmaster Wheel support is also a big letdown. I specifically went with a Thrustmaster wheel because of the belt-driven drive which is far superior to the Logitech gear-driven drives. My other issue is also the lack of TrackIR support in a sim like this. General Annoying Mechanics Some mechanics that I just don’t like or need improvement. Collisions This could probably be avoided if I had a weed whacker for trimming. Since I don’t, I have to slam my tractor into various obstacles that probably have bigger hit boxes than they should. Some of the more complicated yards have more objects to collide with too. Some bushes even act as a solid wall and behave like a metal barrier. Each collision also counts as a penalty and decreases the value of the contract. I can usually offset this by doing the Ground Check quickly, but that’s not how this should be done. Keep in mind, collisions are more of an issue with the more complex jobs that have more obstacles. Trees are the lesser issue for me, except for some of the bigger tractors that collide with the branches. Clean Up Jobs These jobs really have no place in this game. You’ll get a job worth a laughable £30 and all you do is pick up some garbage. The job also won’t leave your queue until you complete it either. Stripe Rating Some jobs require you to get a perfect stripe rating to get the full value of the job. This is just way too high considering the very sensitive controls. You also need a specific mower that has a stripe attachment to complete. I’ve only noticed a couple Zero Turns with this ability. I was able to complete a few of these jobs with a 97%-98% rating, but got docked £10. This isn’t much off the contract, but lets be real, is a human going to dock my pay because my lines were 2%-3% from being perfect? Thick Grass Patches This happens way too often. There is no visual indicator that I need to control my speed, there’s just a meter around your speed that indicates the grass is thick. The grass looks the same as every other patch, but I need this meter just to let me know it’s thicker. Not a fan of this mechanic at ALL. Cruise Control As of writing, this was added to Mouse and Keyboard controls, but not a controller. This is a giant pain when cutting thicker grass patches since this bogs down your mower and also leaves patches of uncut grass behind you. Conclusion This isn’t a bad sim game, but it needs polish. There’s hardly any graphics options and the performance is a little weak for a game of this scale. In my opinion, this is still an Early Access game. I put time in this game, and I’m not seeking a refund, but I wish I would have waited for more updates before jumping in.