Farm Fatale (PC) Review

 

Farm Fatale is a farm based Battle Royale game and more than just weird. The twist of this game is, that it plays on a farm and all shot opponents turn into animals (horses, pigs, chickens or foxes), who wildly run around the map, creating a total chaos. The animals can not be taken out directly, and if they find some human essense (dropped by other killed players), they can respawn as regular players on the map again. I found it pretty frustrating, that the criteria for a final elimination are completely unclear, because the player count is going to drop throughout the game, but there is no apparent way how players can influence this after downing players and turning them into animals.

The farm setting is generally been captured pretty well. The map gets randomly generated every match, but always consist of stables, granaries, windmills and some hay bales for example. NPC farmers (who do not engage in combat) and the players, who turned into animals, help to provide this farm vibe. The map outside of this farm elements however feels definitely too empty. Most parts of the map consist just of one texture green or yellow ground with some occasional bushes and items on top of them.

The playable area of the map shrinks during the match, like in nearly all BR games, but Farm Fatale has a bouncing wall that keeps players from stepping out of the zone. That is certainly a funny idea (in practice however the walls will be bouncing the players all over the place without any control. Sometimes the walls even ported me through a mountain). At the end of the match the ground will be flooded by a pink swamp (the game calls it 'gas'), that will kill all players, who touch it. In my experience all matches ended with the player as the winner, who wasn't at the ground anymore. This is definitely weird as well, since the winner of a BR game should usually be determined by killing other players and not by jumping on top of buildings or mountains.

There are 5 different weapons in Farm Fatale. Every player starts with one weapon and can find the others in chests or from defeated enemies. There are throwable knives, a shotgun, a Uzi, a Sniper Rifle and a Rocket Launcher. The TTK is pretty high in this game and weapon damage and hit detection are sometimes pretty random. In some matches I have had precise rocket launcher hits making 10% damage, while shotgun shots over 30 meters did significantly more. On other matches the damage was more explainable. In any case you could never one-shot anybody. Even with a sniper it will take at least 3 head shots to put an opponent down. Because of these big randomness-factors of the gunplay I am not the biggest fan of it.

Farm Fatale has a player maximum of 20 per match and at the beginning required at least 2 humans to start a match. They changed this by implementing Bots into the game, which I think is a good solution for all BR games, who struggle to maintain a stable population. The Bots work alright, nothing groundbreaking in either direction.

Temporarily servers were broken for around a week, but seem to have been fixed and work problem-free since than (you can unfortunately not say that about every BR, there are more than enough broken games out there).

The visuals of the game are pretty minimalistic and in my opinion rather hideous. The game mostly lacks details in the environment and the randomized maps don't always work to the games favour (I have once got stuck inside of a mountain). There are at least some visual customization options, but sound and controls can not be changed (you can switch the main menu sound volume, but not the ingame soundeffects, which makes it useless). 

 

Pro:

- Farm Setting and animals

- Full Bot support

 

Contra:

- Criteria for eliminations pretty unclear

- Hit-detection and damage output sometimes random

- Rather hideous visuals

- no real customization (controls, sound etc.)

 

Result:

I really want to like this game. A Battle Royale on a farm with animals jumping all over the place is truly something unique. The visuals are not impressive and lack of customization is annoying, but the gunplay and lack of permanent eliminations is what really put me off. The game gives you the feeling off not always being in control, with the weapons behaving too random and not being able to actively eliminate other players for good. I understand what they were going for, but this concept just doesn't work really well in a BR setting.

 

3.5/10