The first farming sim game I fell in love with was Stardew Valley and since then I’ve found it difficult to find anything that tops it. It’s no secret that Stardew takes inspiration from the Harvest Moon series, which has faltered over the past few releases. The Story of Seasons franchise is definitely better than any of the Harvest Moon releases—and Pioneers of Olive Town is a good game—but it isn’t a great game just yet.
Pioneers of Olive town has a fun bright 3D aesthetic and promises, what appears to be, a fun living world. After playing through the game, however, what I discovered was an experience and town that felt a bit shallow. To be fair, before I proceed with this review, the dev team has been and will be releasing updates to address the main issues you may have read about pertaining to a lack of varying dialogue among townsfolk as well as the title’s newest addition biggest annoyance: the maker machines. These maker machines are what’s used to process the raw materials you’ll gain by chopping wood, breaking rocks, etc. into usable materials like iron ore, wood planks, and more.
The major issue with this is, unlike most other farming sim games, each of these machines can only process a single unit per machine! Most other games allow you to batch process materials to cut down on the grind of making machines and taking up valuable space on your farm you’d rather dedicate to, you know, crops. Fortunately, this is being addressed in a May update that will enable single maker machines to process more than one material at a time. This sill significantly improve the gameplay and fun it provides—especially in the first season.
Just like other sim titles, you can cultivate relationships with people in the town via a heart system by giving them gifts (everyone in Olive Town is materialistic) but I never felt attached to the people. Again, more dialogue options have been added which has helped. It’s not just farming that’s on offer in Olive Town however. You can fill your time with a total of 12 skills to level up like fishing, cooking, communication, mining, and more with each capped at level 10. As you work on each of these skills and level them up, you’ll get higher quality materials. Working on and upgrading these skills is rewarding and one of my favorite parts of sim games like this. It’s a good thing these are fun then, because other daily activities like cooking are slow and take up a lot of time to complete.
Other new additions like the camera and museum sounded great, except you’ll soon find out your camera can only hold ten measly photos at a time and—perhaps my biggest gripe with the camera—is the inability to fullscreen photos you’ve taken. That means you won’t be able to take screenshots via the Switch to share on social media, which feels like s huge miss. The museum is also a huge disappointment after coming off of Animal Crossing New Horizons. In ACNH, you can view what you’ve caught in the appropriate habitat with info and when you caught it, while in Pioneers of Olive Town, all you get are rocks that look the same or similar looking shadows of fish.
In the end, Pioneers of Olive Town isn’t a bad game—far form it—but what’s on offer does feel a bit uninspired. If given the choice between Pioneers of Olive Town or XSEED’s upcoming Rune Factory 5, I’d definitely choose the latter, even without playing it.
