“Another beautiful day…”
You groan, pulling yourself from your small cot, stretching your arms above your head. Another beautifully non-descript day, in the beautifully non-descript, dry desert. Balling your big meaty mits into fists, you rub your eyes. A yawn slips from your lips as you lean against the warehouse doorframe. It’s been open all night, leaving you exposed not only to the elements, but a whole onslaught of beautifully non-descript zombies. You thank the powers that be that despite being barely more than flesh-eating husks, they have unbelievably impeccable manners.
A woman with unkempt brown hair rambles past, a shockingly deep, guttural moan erupting from her mouth. “Ma’am.” You note the murky green tinge of her skin, the usual beautifully non-descript features and your head in a small nod of acknowledgment. She rambles past, paying you no mind and going no-where in particular, much like yourself. “Well, back to it, then.” You wrap your overwhelmingly meaty fist around your unbelievably generic shovel, making your way out to your unremarkable, non-descript potato patch. The woman pivots with a groan, lumbering in your direction. A few swift, yet somehow unbelievably clunky thwacks dispatches her.
“All in a days work.”

Horrible type spacing is highly distracting, and plagues the entire game- a least in it's present form. 

The Last Farmer is a survival/horror game by developer Geekon. What will be the developers 15^th game release within a year-and a half, one might be slightly pensive as to what sort of quality they’re bringing to the table. If my time spent in-game as well as taking the overwhelmingly trend-specific ratings of prior titles into account: the concerns are entirely well founded. That being said, while there is ABSOLUTELY a market of games that are simply “so bad they’re good”, it seems as though Geekon misses the mark even in that regard.

As with any survival-craft title, you start at the bottom. Punch away at small trees with your enormous Potato Pickers to nab enough resources to craft tools.

Coming-to in a dead-end nook of a desert, your character makes his way to a small overlook, where you find the remnants of a barn, and a conveniently placed natural source of clean water. Within the dilapidated barn, you find a worse-for-wear car (which will turn into a long term project to help aid in your supply runs) and a “conveniently” placed bed, as well as several workstations you’ll need to get up and running to get yourself fully functional for the road ahead, as desolate and clunky as it may be. Effectively you’re a farmer in a post-zombie-apocalypse situation, just trying to survive in your “journey of restoration”! Bide your time scavenging ruins, building your defenses, and tending your land to be self sufficient.

A wandering stranger turned up in the middle of the night. Trying to talk with them yielded no results, as they sprinted off across the barren wasteland without a word.

And what a journey it is! Opening strong with poor font spacing during story-board cut scenes and atrocious spelling mistakes within the bare bones tutorial, you’ll be journeying across your keyboard trying to figure out what keys do what. Minimal explanations and no viewable key binding menu, or ability adds to frustrations. While some of the controls feel about par for the industry, the inability to remap or even view them starts players off on a fairly sour note. To further add to the magnificently clunky journey, poor optimization, overly sensitive default movement (the default is set to 25, I ended upsetting mine to 10 for it to feel “normal”) as well as generally broken settings plague The Last Farmer. Default sound settings end up near muted is the slider is moved more than a few ticks. Music changes suddenly, without warning nor transition, and without any real reason. The audio is bland and uninspired, and grows old quickly. In addition, the voice acting is relatively bland and awkward, leaving MUCH to be desired.

Nonsensical home layouts plague the game, that make little-to-no sense, even in a post apocalypse setting. Even still, cluttered and repetitive asset use makes POIs lackluster.

As far as visuals go, there is very little to write home about. From your giant Meat Mittens with oddly protruding fingernails to the blatant use of assets slapped left and right, there is not much to see. Picking the barren obscure desert of Texas leave little to be seen, sans randomly placed (and nonsensically designed) homes, abandoned military bases, and odd “points of interest” that have little to be interested in, and seem relatively out of place. In an odd way, it almost feels like the desert was a choice made as an excuse for it to be relatively bare in terms of “filler”. What could have been a relatively promising concept, once again, falls flat.

A wonderfully non-descript zombie, for your viewing pleasure. Muddled, uninspired, and rigged about as lazily as one could expect.

In a market nearly over saturated in both survival craft as well as zombie titles, you will find plenty of titles that do what is attempted here, but better for near the same cost. While perhaps not hinging on the Farmer aspect as much, games like 7 Days to Die still provide a vastly more entertaining time, and much less frustration. In short, due to repetitive assets, boring and blurry zombies with the same vocals, uninspired design and just a general lack of effort really make The Last Farmer just about The Last Thing On My List when it comes to Zombie Survival Craft titles.

The Last Farmer unfortunately released on Steam October 24th.