Category: Nintendo News

These days, practically every possible kind of pastime, occupation and setting has a gaming equivalent. Take the simulation genre for instance; a place that’s packed with all manner of seemingly mundane concepts that have gamified to create some of the most bizarrely engrossing experiences you can play. Farming simulators have been around for years, offering up a relaxed environment where your only worry is harvesting some crops before they with whither or keeping your pigs well fed.

With Giants Software’s Farming Simulator seemingly sidestepping a release on a Switch this year (it debuted on the console last year), Visual Imagination Software’s rival series (yes, there’s even rivalry in the virtual agriculture scene) Professional Farmer has stepped into the fill the void with Professional Farmer: Nintendo Switch Edition. With a similar setup and collection of in-game systems, can this new hybrid iteration do enough to set it apart from its more popular counterpart? Let’s pull on our muddiest set of wellies and head out into the fields to find out…

To be blunt, Farming Simulator is to Professional Farmer what FIFA is to PES. One has the bigger budget and access to real-world licences, while the other has to make do with dodgier-looking assets and made-up brand names. So if you’re a farming sim devotee, you’ll have to make do with a generic Vistra tractor rather than a John Deere or a Case model. It’s certainly more authentic having some familiar badges and designs, but for most of us, these knock-off combine harvesters and slurry tanks will do the job.

And do the job they do, but that’s about the only real positives you can lay at Professional Farmer’s poorly-rendered feet. It’s functional in the fact that it runs, but it does very little to set itself apart from Farming Simulator or attempt one-up it in terms of in-game mechanics or aesthetic chops. Its vehicles are mostly devoid of detail (especially if you’re playing in the preferred cockpit view) and everything from grass and crops to the background mountains look like something pulled straight out of an early ’90s foray into CG animation.

Compared to the far more detailed array of trees, barns, vehicles and backgrounds in Farming Simulator: Nintendo Switch Edition, there’s really no excuse for the developer releasing a product that looks substantially inferior to a game that came out one year prior. This also applies to the in-game physics, with everything from tractors to harvesters handling unwieldy to the point of farce. This is a simulator after all, so why is our vehicle still moving when we’ve been holding down the brake for a few seconds already? And why does our tractor get stuck halfway into a tunnel while other cars simply pass right through us?

Unfortunately, the agricultural playground you’ll be working in isn’t an open-world setting, but a series of Monster Hunter-style sandboxes that you’ll need to fast-travel to from the menus. The loading times aren’t too bad when you do so, but considering the memory that’s been saved in the drop in asset quality, surely the developer was in a position to link all of its fields, towns and other rural locales into one interconnected setup? Giants Software managed with the various Farming Simulators on PS Vita, so why has this issue persisted in the Professional Farmer series?

Despite these problems, the game’s approach to menus – and the access it gives you – is one of its better qualities. By pressing the ‘-’ button you can see all your vehicles, check the status of each field, see how your livestock are doing and perform that aforementioned fast-travel. You can even hire a farmhand to help keep your various animals watered and fed. However, it all feels a little pointless when you consider that the overall cost of the meat your produce never changes, regardless of how good your animal husbandry is.

The actual farming mechanics themselves are decent, and despite the lack of licenses, there’s a good variety of trailers and vehicles to buy. Having your farm start off with a large sum of cash already invested in it does take away a little of the joy that comes with building your business up from a single field and a tiny farm to a fully-fledged empire that covers the entire county, but it does a least provide you means to till, plough and harvest at your leisure. Of course, that’s if the game doesn’t suddenly bug out and send your tractor falling through the level, like ours did a couple of times. Oh, what a lark. Still, you do get a virtual dog on your farm, so we guess that’s worth a point at least.

Conclusion

Despite having a year extra to work on its own addition to the genre, Visual Imagination Software’s agricultural offering fails to outdo Farming Simulator at its own game. There are things to like about Professional Farmer: Nintendo Switch Edition – including the more realistic harvest cycles and the deformation of soil when tilling and ploughing a field – but even the presence of a faithful digital pooch isn’t enough to keep this semi-handheld offering from being towed back to the garage from whence it came.

You are Carl, the manager of a crumbling apartment block in some grey European city. Which doesn’t sound like a particularly thrilling video game role, we’re sure you’ll agree. That is, until you realise that Carl is a cog in the grinding machine of a totalitarian regime, and was appointed to his new role by the state.

So, alongside repairing TV sets, introducing yourself to the new tenant in apartment 4 and making time to see to your young family’s needs, you’ll be spying on your neighbours and reporting on their every misdeed and foible.

You’ll sneak into their apartment when they’re out at work and install spy cameras and rummage around for incriminating evidence, using the state’s ever-increasing number of proclamations to catch them out. Sometimes you’ll be instructed directly by the state to dig up some dirt on one of those tenants, and if they’re squeaky clean you might have to force the issue through murky means.

It’s not imperative that you sell your fellow man up the river. You could warn them that they’re under state surveillance, or even offer to help them. They might even thank you for it. But those thanks won’t reward you with the money you need to keep your son in an education, or to pay for the costly repairs from a recent terrorist (or, depending on your view, freedom fighter) attack. Toeing the party line is always the most lucrative option, which naturally creates plenty of moral quandaries.

Beholder: Complete Edition (so-called because it includes the Blissful Sleep DLC) is all about the tough decisions, and achieving some kind of balance between making a life for yourself and retaining a shred of humanity. There are consequences to your actions, too; our first run ended prematurely when we tried to do a bit of wheeling-and-dealing on the side, then attempted to deflect the blame up the ladder when it all came crashing down. We soon found ourselves dying at the hands of one of our tenants, and judging by the brutally abrupt concluding scene, the rest of our family wasn’t far behind.

Beholder is played from a strange 2.5D perspective, with a hyper-stylised and shadowy aesthetic. You’re granted a side-on cross-sectional view of your apartment block, though you can move into the background to interact with furniture, and zoom in and out of the action at will using ZR and the right stick.

It’s impossible to see inside your neighbours’ apartments without one of those aforementioned cameras (which actually behave more like overhead lamps), or by peering through individual keyholes. Spot a neighbour doing something illegal, and a click of the right stick will commit that evidence to the records, ready to be written up and reported. You’ll need to check in regularly with your anonymous government contact, and you’d better come running when you hear that phone ringing.

There’s a grim satisfaction to performing your treacherous task, interspersed by moments of profound guilt. Watching the pleasant old man who gave your son an expensive book for his studies getting beaten and dragged away by the police was one such occasion. It was Carl (okay, us) who planted an apple in their cabinet before dobbing the innocent chap in.

Yes, apples are considered illegal in this regime. It’s a handy example of Beholder’s blunt, exaggerated, even darkly humorous world. Its political points are rather on the nose – corrupt state control bad, civil liberties good – but effectively delivered, nonetheless.

It took a while for us to click with Beholder, and that’s down to a couple of issues. For one thing, the controls can be quite fiddly. Whenever multiple interactive elements are stacked up close together, it can be a real pain selecting the appropriate contextual prompt with the A button. The developer has brought in the left arrow buttons to flick between these elements in such situations, but there’s no escaping the flakiness of the system.

Also, we found ourselves a little confused during the opening stretch of the game. Maybe we missed the part where it was mentioned, but we found ourselves wandering around looking for the shop that was being talked about – until we realised it was accessed from a simple menu. There was nothing in the help files on this, either. Things tend to get mentioned in passing and then left to you to muddle through.

Indeed, while Beholder: Complete Edition isn’t a difficult game to play as such, it can leave you at a loss as to what to do next. Often the solution is simply to wander around talking to everyone and looking for the appropriate conversation option. Generally speaking, you’re looking to tick tasks off in the right order, according to the time you’ve been given for each. In fact, once you figure everything out, it can feel like so much busywork. The mechanics and rhythm of play can start to take on a repetitive, monotonous note.

But there’s no denying the power of Beholder’s setting, or the basic soundness of its core systems. Placing you in a grotesque dystopian world and casting you as a flawed cog in ‘the machine’ rather than a righteous saviour is a brave move for any game. It pays off with a strategy management game that constantly makes you think about the human toll of your decisions.

Conclusion

Beholder’s dystopian world provides a grimly satisfying management playground to work in. It’s got plenty of heart – albeit a rather scorched black one – and it forces you into making genuinely interesting moral and ethical decisions, which should be enough to see you through the tiresome grind, muddled signposting and rather flakey controls.