Agriculture is a fast action puzzle game where you must plant, water, harvest, and ship crops in a given amount of time.  It’s like the harvesting part of Harvest Moon with an extra dose of caffeine.  It’s available on all current consoles but reviewed on PS4 here.

In each level, you must ship a certain amount of different kinds of veggies.  You can move around your farmer dude with the control stick.  First you’ll need to visit a shop to buy seeds.  Then you can use the D pad to pick which action you want to take, and then use the button to perform it.  You must first till the soil patches by hoeing them.  Then you can plant seeds.  Switch between the seeds and plants you hold with the L and R buttons.  After planting, you must quickly water them before they dry out.  After that you can harvest them and place them in the shipping bin.  If you can do all that before the time runs out, you win and can move onto the next level.  If not, you must start the level over again.

I had a whole list of problems with this one.  First and foremost, they don’t tell you how to play.  Granted, it’s pretty easy to figure things out on your own, but I had to usually fail a stage to learn that my crops would dry out quickly, or I had to refill my watering can at some point, etc.  Also, for a game about time management, they don’t give you any time at all between planting and watering before they dry up, so you really can’t plant large amounts of crops or plan ahead.  This makes anything past stage 8 nigh impossible.  I also didn’t like how you had to use the D-pad to switch actions.  They could’ve just had it where you use the four face buttons to perform actions and removed a step.  And finally, this game really looks like it could be a two player co-op game, and would probably be much better that way, but it’s single player only.  And if you can play two players, I couldn’t figure it out because there are no instructions!  So yeah, this is one game that needed more time in the ground to ripen.

Kid Factor:

Nothing violent or objectionable here.  Although the game gets very difficult quickly so younger gamers may get bored and/or frustrated.  Agriculture is rated E for Everyone.

Tags: Game Reviews