Cyber Farmer

FreeMind already knows how to make a farming sim. It made one in 2023 called Farmer's Life, and 2,763 Steam reviews say 88.7% of players liked it. Cyber Farmer takes that same studio, that same basic loop of tending crops and animals on grandpa's farm, and drops it into a nuclear wasteland where the pigs glow and the tractor walks on four robotic legs. That's a genuinely fun premise for a spin-off. What it isn't, according to a chunk of the people who've bought it, is a new game — and the week it actually left Early Access, the reviews turned harsher than they'd been for the five months before it.

A farm you've worked before

The lineage isn't subtle, and FreeMind isn't hiding it — Cyber Farmer's own store description leans into "old meets new," with grandson Kazimierz inheriting his grandfather's land just as the original game's hero did. What several reviewers object to is how much of the old actually made it into the new. One player with over 160 hours in Farmer's Life opens their (positive) review by admitting the "similarities are as expected." Others are far less charitable: one describes it as "all just re-used assets from the first game," pointing to the replacement of a horse-drawn plow with a robotic tractor that "operates the same as the horse" but strips out camera control, and a hand-sown seed system replaced by a drone with "weird possibly inverted controls that can't be changed." Another reviewer's one-line verdict is blunter still: "could have just retextured the first game and it would be better." A German reviewer who says they loved the original calls the music, sound design and assets a straight carryover, wrapped around a title they consider a technical step backward on hardware (an RTX 5090 and a Ryzen 9950X3D) far beyond what either game needs.

That's the central tension the score below has to weigh: the sci-fi ideas layered on top are real, but the foundation under them reads, to a meaningful slice of its own audience, as recycled rather than rebuilt.

What the automation actually is

Steam's own vote-weighted tag list — pulled from the page's tag-modal data rather than the developer-ordered pills higher up — ranks Farming Sim first, Agriculture second and Automation third, ahead of Sci-fi, Sandbox and Building. That's a real signal, not a marketing choice, and the official screenshots back it up: a first-person HUD showing a running task list ("Feed the chickens," "Sow tomatoes," "Repair the shed"), a wrench-and-wiring repair system with context prompts like "press F to connect" on exposed junction boxes, robotic farmhands standing in for hired labour, and — new for the full release — a cloning machine that converts the remains of irradiated larvae into implants. Those implants slow the drain on hunger, thirst and fatigue, speed radiation recovery, and raise carrying capacity, each across five upgrade tiers tracked on an in-game tablet. There's a real progression ladder here, even if it's a modest one.

What the automation is not, on the evidence available, is a deep systemic layer players build and optimise the way a factory-builder's is. It's closer to reskinned convenience: the tractor and the drone replace manual actions from the original game one-for-one rather than opening new choices, and the same detailed negative review that catalogues the game's bugs also singles out the drone specifically — "manual farming with the drone is the worst thing in the world." Read the tag weight as evidence that automation is a real part of what Cyber Farmer is selling, not as evidence that it's executed well.

Bugs, missing strings and a launch that reads worse than the beta

Early Access began 26 February 2026, and FreeMind's news feed shows a genuinely fast hotfix cadence through the following weeks — seventeen numbered hotfixes by 28 March alone, closing specific issues players named, including a broken vehicle camera and a quest-blocking bug involving Kazimierz's cow. That responsiveness is worth crediting on its own terms.

What's harder to credit is the state the game shipped in on 3 August. The most detailed negative review in the corpus — from a player with just under 12 hours logged — reports "less than 5 hours worth of quests and content," a machine that becomes permanently unusable if it's activated without enough stored power or water, ambient monster audio that plays with no monster attached to it, and untranslated dialogue that surfaces as a raw string key rather than English text. Others report the game crashing outright, missing English localisation elsewhere in the interface, and quests that "glitch" or lock up if played out of the order the game expects. None of that is exotic sci-fi-farming feedback; it's the same list of complaints any unfinished game draws, regardless of its premise.

Steam's own numbers make the timing of it worse than the individual complaints do. Reading the review corpus by date splits it cleanly around the 3 August full-release: through the preceding Early Access months, sentiment ran 58% positive (26 of 45). In the six days bracketing the full release itself, it fell to roughly 4 positive against 9 negative — a corpus small enough, at 58 reviews total, that every one of those was read individually rather than sampled. One of the loudest recent complaints puts the disappointment plainly: "this should not have left early access. do not buy this, buy farmer's life instead." A launch is supposed to read better than the beta that came before it. This one reads worse.

The larvae problem

One specific piece of new content draws criticism on its own, separate from the bug list. A May 2026 update introduced giant mutated larvae that attack the player — a combat beat dropped into what has, up to that point, been a cozy, task-driven farming loop. A reviewer with 84 hours logged, who otherwise tracks the game's improvement across seven hotfixes in detail and clearly likes it, calls the larvae update "disgusting" and says it "does little to nothing to improve upon the game experience," adding that it landed roughly a month after the previous major content update. It's a small piece of the overall picture, but it's evidence of a broader pattern: new systems are shipping faster than the existing ones are getting finished.

Price and what you're actually buying

At NZ$10.32 — 30% off a NZ$14.75 list price, checked 7 August 2026 — Cyber Farmer costs well under half what Farmer's Life asks at full price, and the purchase itself is clean: no DLC is attached to this Steam listing, no in-game store, no premium currency, nothing to upsell once you're in. Thirteen supported languages is a respectable spread for a small studio, even with reviewers reporting holes in the English text specifically. Set against that: no controller support is listed, where the predecessor offers full support, and the achievement API returns nothing at all — there's no achievement schema on this listing to measure how far players are actually getting.

Final verdict

Cyber Farmer earns a 4.5. The sci-fi systems it adds on top of FreeMind's existing farming formula — the task list, the robotic tractor and drone, the cloning machine and its implant ladder — are real and occasionally clever, and the studio's Early Access hotfix record shows a team that responds to its own players. But a meaningful share of that same player base, including some of the predecessor's biggest fans, describe the result as a lightly reskinned repeat rather than a new game, and the technical state at full release — crashes, missing localisation, quests that lock up, a raw string key surfacing in dialogue — reads worse than the Early Access build that came before it. A NZ$10 farming sim with real new ideas deserves better odds than that. If you already love Farmer's Life and want to see the same loop wearing a radiation suit, the price makes this an easy, low-stakes look. If you're choosing your first farming sim from this studio, buy the original instead.