This game commits a cardinal sin of holding up long enough to outlast the first two hours of refund period, and then it shows you all of its cracks.

"MR FARMBOY is a colony farming game with automation." says the first sentence in the store page description, and the tags support this statement. But it is as much of a "colony" and "farming" game, as cookie clicker is a bakery simulator. Mr. Farmer is a basic incremental game with farming assets: plant X of Y to unlock Z. Repeat a hundred times.

The "automation" consists of you buying farmhands, which do the work. All of your agency in this process boils down to "pick a place for the building" and then "optionally, select a crop this building's occupants should prioritize". Sit back and relax, you just performed "automation".

There's no weather, seasons, decisions, nor story. Time passes, and the day counter increments, but there's absolutely nothing to indicate that: you don't go to sleep, the night doesn't fall. The map is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ square with three types of terrain: grass, sand and water. There's no wildlife. Trees or weeds don't spread. It's a dead static square grid for you to fill with monotone buildings and crop plots.

There's no meaningful difference between crops, outside of profit per second. So once you've reached all the milestones associated with a crop, you don't have to ever come back to it.

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This game commits an even worse sin of slapping a 1.0 label on a product, which should be deeply in early access.

Every time I load a savegame, something weird happens. I either get achievements, which definitely weren't yet achieved, or I lose progress in some way.

While the overall UX is not stellar, you can kinda get used to it. But certain actions, like releasing a building which you've picked up by accident, don't execute immediately, and that is awfully annoying.

There's quite a few language-related issues. Some might be typos, some are just wrong grammar. Whatever I've encountered so far was fairly minor, but I can imagine some people being annoyed by the incorrect English, especially those who learn English through games, like me.

In "1.0 Hotfix 2" description the developer literally says "Reworked something-something, but it wasn't properly tested and may contain bugs, so let me know". I 100% appreciate the honesty, and wish that more developers were like that. But brother, solo dev or not, if you didn't test it, then maybe don't release it? Or at least release it in a beta branch, if you want your customers to test your unfinished work?

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TLDR: the game is cheap, but unfinished. I don't recommend buying it at this moment.

This is not rightfully 1.0. I was having a ton of fun until I hit a ceiling induced by size. For example, the workers who feed the animals and pick up their drops are called ranchers. To save them from having to walk fully across the farm, I made another warehouse with animal food in it closer to the barn. I would personally walk animal food across the farm to the feeding warehouse as part of my chores. I expected that since the barn warehouse was much further away from the field growing the food that gatherers would walk the food to the much, much closer warehouse. They did not. They almost never preferred the closer warehouse.

At this point in writing the review, I got the idea that I could separate the road network where they grow the food from the road network where they feed the animals and have warehouses in both. This was based on an idea I had that you could separate the ranchers from the warehouse, believing that they wouldn't bother trying to feed the animals. My belief was wrong. If the road networks are separated, they will try to go to the other network to get food and drop everything until you connect them, complaining that they can't reach the warehouse. But perhaps, I thought, if they had a warehouse in their own network, they would go to that one. So I booted up the game to test this theory, it installed an update, and the controller didn't work.

It's probably for the best that controller support for this game does not work. The controller support was terrible. Button presses when switching menu views wouldn't register and when you switched seeds, it would plant the last seed unless you performed some ritual that now comes so naturally to me that I couldn't tell you exactly what it is. This includes when you switch away from building, say, an expensive road or farm patch, to a cheap one. So you have to pray that you don't accidentally waste 5 manure (very, very valuable resource, especially early on) trying to switch to something different.

The inventory management system is bad. When adding items to warehouses, markets, and barns, every possible item you could have is listed in your inventory. The purpose of this is that you can add an item that you have none of to a warehouse so that when your gatherers/etc do get one, they will bring it to this location. It puts items already in the warehouse/market/barn at the top of your inventory, but when there is nothing already there, you have to go through a gigantic list of items you could possibly have to put in that spot. This gets terrible when you unlock high-quality crops, because all 4 qualities of crop are listed as possibilities for each crop you have unlocked. There are 40 possible crops. Also, you can't view your inventory. The first 15 or so are listed on the right, but they literally get cut off by the size of the screen, and they frequently have serious errors in their counts.

There is so much that is so good about this game. I have very deep thoughts about how innovative it is and where it fits in the genre landscape that I want to share very badly. I would have dumped all of these thoughts into a glowing review if this game simply had the "Early Access" tag on it.

It's far too buggy with clicking and poorly balanced. The game is built on bought assets from kenmi-art on itchio, and he used ai for code in his Twitch stream. The result is a lack of optimization, and a lack of skill and technical knowledge to meaningfully improve the game. The game is severely unpolished and overall tedious enough to push you past the refund gate of two hours. I'm really disappointed.