User Reviews (1 - 11 of 28)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

Game is a disgrace and disappointment shame on John Deere

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 14 / 21
Date: September 21, 2005
Author: Amazon User

As a farmer I am offended by this game, it made farmers look like bafoons with the dullard characters and the simpleton sounds they made.
The game is very disappointing and did not live up to what it advertised on the cover. There were only two tractors to choose from and only three implements. You only had a choice of 4 crops. This paucity of choices was further frustrated by a game that simply did not work, the bugs are unbearable. Did anyone in development ever play the game?
SHAME ON JOHN DEERE for endorsing this game. They insulted there buying market, if this is what John Deere thinks of its customers I will not buy anymore farming implements from them.

Too many bugs in game

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 9
Date: December 26, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game for my husband for Christmas and although he liked the concept it just gets hung up too often to make it enjoyable to play. We downloaded the patch somebody else referenced but it would not install. We may be doing something wrong but there was also no instruction/information pamphlet with the game so who knows. Basically he has quit playing already because of all the bugs so I'd have to suggest that you not waste your money on it.

Disappointed Dirt Clod

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 11
Date: April 25, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Don't waste your money. I bought this hoping it was a modern, more appealing take on the old sim farm. My 4 year old loves John Deere and I thought he would enjoy playing it. Nope. The interface is too complicated and filled with tedious tasks for a kid to stay interested - Seems you spend most of your time getting people in and out of vehicles, which would be great if it were an equipment simulator, but it is not. Too many selections are needed to access regular tasks like hiring crop dusters or checking market trends. The only positives are that the graphics and animation are better and there are more choices in equipment. But overall the game is incredibly tedious. There is no way to schedule tasks in advance (a great feature of sim farm). You can miss your planting or harvesting windows if one of your dolt employees wanders off. I don't want to buy more land as I cannot even fathom the aggravation of getting crops planted and harvested in more than 6 fields. The 4 available crops are a joke. Sim farm had 20 or more. As others noted, you really the ability to assign workers specific tasks - You can lose half a season if one wanders from the veggie plots to clean a barn on the other side of the farm - especially since in the process they will avoid any vehicles! You also need a pause option where you can assign several workers tasks, instead of losing valuable time trying to find out where Clem wandered off to. Where are the equipment sheds? What self respecting farmer will leave a 300,000 combine sitting in the rain? Finally, I truly expected many more equipment choices given the John Deere headline. Maybe even a dealership where I could go test drive, after all, the dinosaur sim farm let you fly the crop duster. This is the first John Deere toy I've ever bought that was a disappointment. Maybe they should have given Ertl a crack at it.

Hard to play a game that doesn' work

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 6
Date: January 03, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The game won't load correctly and the patch doesn't fix it. Tech support at Bold Games / Take2 is unresponsive. Simply kick back an automated response that addresses nothing. Unfortunately this was a Christmas present...straight to the garbage.

An upgrade is needed

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 9
Date: February 22, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This is a program full of bugs... you can't win...you can't even patch the problems the prevent you from winning.

I can appreciate the comments that it is not "realisitic"..I live on a farm and it is not realistic, but then I didn't expect it would be...I just thought it would be fun. Its annoying habit of denying you to remedy situations was not however. It was just frustrating.

This could be improved so many ways and I was looking for a patch for it before I wrote this reviewbut that doesn't exist so...

... The graphics are dark to the point you think you are living in Alaska 6 months of the year! Who farms in the dark?
.....You can't find the equipment when you need it because it is so dark
...and Ellie May saying "you got it partner" gets on the nerves after the 50th time you have her search the property.

If "Budding Millionaire" (Charlotte, MI) bought the farm and acreage as claimed, I will attest to the fact that she "bought the farm" in all senses! It is NOT possible!

This game would be decent at $4.99 and makes me glad I have an Allis in the pole barn.

It's okay but I don't recommend it.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 12 / 13
Date: August 31, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Like others have said, the game does have a lot of bugs. My computer is new and high quality so I'm pretty sure it's the game and not my computer acting up. The game will freeze occassionally, other times i won't be able to preform some actions such as repairing the barn. And so it'll end up in such bad shape that my animals get loose. Sometimes my staff (when on auto) will leave to repair invisible items that I don't own, which wastes a lot of time. Prices to sell/buy animals will freeze, which, as you can imagine, makes making a profit on them very difficult. I have to restart the game every time something like this happens.

Also the game moves kind of slowly, even when the speed is set to "fast." Watching animals mature or vegetables grow can get boring lol.

I like the concept of the game though. If they create a 2nd version it may be worth buying.

Fun game but so many bugs stopped play.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 12 / 13
Date: October 16, 2004
Author: Amazon User

The game is a lot of fun for those of us who enjoy a clean simulation game without 'bad guys' and shooting. I like the challanging senerios however I have not been able to complete a full game yet because glitches in the game stop play from advancing. One such problem is a combine getting caught on a tree and you can not stop the person from continuing the activity, even after the equipment was sold they would not change patterns. Another problem is the game randomly not allowing you to click on some buildings, or thinking that a new building needs repairing because it has not yet been fixed. These glitches cause the game to be less than perfect, however the concept is wonderful. I would be very interested in purchasing a 2nd version of the game, perhaps with irrigation as an option.

Good Luck!

Fine Farming Fun, But Could Have Been More

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 10 / 12
Date: August 04, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I've been playing American Farmer for only a little while, and I don't have much more to add to the reviews that have already been listed. First, as a little hint, your family members WON'T always leave. Their happines is derived in part from the leisure items you can purchase, but also from the distribution of work load (which can be viewed via the "People" tab in the "Farm" report available to you). A family member with a majority of the workload will be much more unhappy than a family member standing around petting the dog all the time.

My biggest complaint with the game that hasn't already been mentioned is the unintelligence of the AI. Each farm worker/family member has an auto task button which will allow the worker to take care of all the non-strategic decisions (like feeding animals, repairing the barn, etc). But, the worker never uses any of the vehicles available to make the task easier. For example, you can purchase a tractor with a bulldozer like scoop whose sole purpose, I think, is to clean out the barn. But, when barn cleaning time comes around, the AI will never use that piece of equipment and will instead have the worker clean out the barn manually.

Otherwise, the game is enjoyable, and even somewhat addictive, at first. But, its not the kind of game that you're going to keep coming back to play again and again.

Great potential, needs polish

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 10 / 13
Date: August 31, 2005
Author: Amazon User

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 adjust it in the game options.

I would recommend passing this game up and waiting for a sequel or a sorely needed patch.

Sugar Rush Of A Game

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 7 / 8
Date: July 28, 2004
Author: Amazon User

John Deere American Farmer is bug ridden, very slow at times, and doesn't come with much else to do than complete 11 scenarios and create your own. I'm a campaign/mission person myself. Despite these faults, I found it wholly entertaining and semi-addictive at times. For a little while. It's a game that could have been so much more though if it had stretched a little further.

The scenarios ask varying things, but each starts with giving you a plot on a large piece of land, with the option of buying and selling aforementioned land. If you've played tycoons before (or the Sims) the layout should be familiar. You can build 4 types of structures: utility, hobby, leisure, and housing. Utility is all the farming stuff; hobby allows you to buy 4 types of extra buildings (like the vegetable garden) where you can get produce to sell at a road stand. Housing and leisure are to keep family members happy. See, you always start with 1 or 2 family members, and can always hire more workers. The family members work for free, but complain a lot and their satisfaction goes down. You can build lots of leisure objects, but you are delaying the inevitable. The family members (except for original one) will always leave.

Kudos for the vastly different family members and workers, I only wish they had more personality. 4 or 5 hillbilly statements does not a character make. Another simulation game I really enjoyed, Space Colony, derived a lot of its charm from the characters.

If you are hoping for contact between the characters, or to get them to use one of the 6 (ONLY 6) leisure objects available, you're out of luck. For better or worse John Deere is purely a work simulation. It goes so far as to skip the winter months, since there is no work to be done (in this game). What you can do is plant and harvest 4 types of crops (corn, wheat, sunflowers, and soybeans) and take care of 3 types of animals in commercial marketing style. You buy them as infants, feed them, then sell them for meat. I tend to stick with the dairy cows myself, since they can be milked instead of butchered.
What animals you buy or crops you plant is your choice, but if you want to succeed you're going to have to pay attention to the market trends. Sell high, buy low - just like the stock market. Watch the trends and predict. Happily, you can store crops in silos until the prices are to your liking.

The equipment, crops, buildings etc at your disposal in John Deere seem vast and confusing in the beginning, but once you've read the very helpful in game help/manual a few times it's not very hard at all. There is no tutorial, and the scenarios are not listed in order of difficulty or any other discernable pattern. The first scenario happens to be one of hardest, but after you beat that one you should pretty much know the game. The scenarios get more and more pointless the more you master the game, as there are long periods of nothing to do and then short bursts of extreme activity. There are 3 speeds, but these are not sufficient to alleviate the switches between extreme boredom and stress for the player.

The graphics are pretty so-so but get the job done, while the music gets on your nerves after awhile. Game play is so-so, but with all the bugs it seems limited. Controlling your people is not as easy as it could have been, and often get stuck in buildings. Be prepared to save a lot, as the bugs in this game can suddenly block off a building or get your tractor stuck transferring grain.

I played John Deere non-stop for about a week. It was entertaining and educating, but the lack of scenarios (hardly enough to satisfy long term) and the bugs, as well as the lack of objects and personality of characters made it the pc equivalent of equivalent of a sugar rush - short, sweet, and ultimately leaves you feeling unsatisfied.

Review Page: 1 2 3 Next 

Actions