Farm Tech is an interesting blend of a lot of things. You’ve got the farm sim life, planting seeds, gathering forage, and while not in the demo, fishing. You’ve got a defense mode with setting up towers to protect your crops. When night falls, it’ll play similar to an action bullet hell like Enter The Gungeon, just with less bullet hell. I’m sorry, I don’t have a good word…thing for similar playstyle games.
From the demo it’s hard to get a read on the game, it’s certainly a work in progress. It’s uncertain if it’s trying to do too much, and has a feel of that. The farming/tower defense portion works ok, but the foraging feels unnecessary. You move slowly around a large space picking berries and mushrooms just to add a few extra bucks to buy stuff with. Your movement isn’t any faster during the daytime, and icons for berry bushes will show on the minimap even if there aren’t any to pick. This causes a slowdown in the overall core gameplay loop, especially where there isn’t any time limit to day or night. Night starts when you get into bed, and ends when you kill the last monster. Though, going for a chiller/cozy vibe, it may end up working, especially with fishing and more to do in the traditional farm sim game style.
Though the nighttime gameplay itself rarely felt threatening, at least going through 2 weeks of it in the demo. I’m not sure if there are any hard day limits in the demo, but it didn’t change night to night much after a certain threshold. The monsters, while meant to be aliens based on the Steam page description, are called zombies in the achievements ingame. They do move much slower than you do, so it’s easy to run backwards and shoot, and everything seems to chase you if you’re close enough and hit them, allowing you to save your crops if the towers aren’t enough. Additionally, the diagonal fences on the corners of the map seem to completely block monsters, probably due to a bug that doesn’t allow them to interact with them properly.
The game itself is just a demo, but it seems like there is a lot of polish and work left to get it to the creators vision. The zombie/alien mismatch, the fences, unfinished systems (fishing, upgrades, companions, house design). The inventory system as is seems kinda superfluous as well, it’s large enough that I can’t see how you’d ever fill it, but items only stack to 10. With one type of monster drop, 2 types of forage, and 4 types of seed, more than the one bar doesn’t seem to add much. This depends on what fishing adds, but you have to hit random keys to find out what opens your backpack to manage it, if you ever bother (it’s tab btw).
There is a bit of QOL that’d be nice, nothing has tooltips, so you can’t tell if there is any benefit to growing one crop over another. The loot monsters drop at night have a limited timespan to pick up, but you can’t exit your own fences after you’ve killed the monsters on the other side. This means requiring you to leave a gap to walk around and shoot manually (especially those corner ones), and anything killed by turrets may mean you lose out on money you need to replace or replant for the next day. Also, there isn’t any sort of save system it seems, which is fine for a demo, but it means if you want to sit down and see everything, you need probably 45 minutes or more.
The Farm Tech Demo is still available on it’s Steam Page. Originally released last year, it’s taken me this long to actually pick up and play and I feel a bit bad about that. It doesn’t have any sort of release window at time of posting. It held my attention long enough to see what seems to be the real limits of the demo, but it’s missing so much to make it feel complete by any sense.