The Ranchers

Most of the people leaving negative reviews for The Ranchers wanted the same thing, and they say so in almost identical words: they wanted to play a farming game with their partner or their friends, the way you play Stardew Valley together, and this isn't that.

The Ranchers has co-op for four players. What it doesn't have is a shared world where each player keeps their own farm and their own progress. You join someone else's ranch and help with their chores. For solo players that distinction is invisible; for the couple who bought two copies to build something together, it's the whole purchase. That gap accounts for more of this game's Mixed rating than any bug does.

The game underneath

Which is a shame, because there's a lot here. The Ranchers is an open-world country-life sim rather than a single-valley farm game — you buy lots of land, place buildings where you want them rather than in prescribed slots, and drive across a genuinely large map to the city and back. The simulation reaches further than the genre norm: vehicles need refuelling at petrol stations, trunks carry your cargo, crops and animals want tending on their own schedule.

The freedom is the selling point and it delivers. Players who like arranging a homestead exactly their way have more room here than Stardew Valley or most of its descendants allow, and the building and decoration systems are meaty enough to sustain that. Presentation is warm rather than twee, it runs well on modest hardware, and Steam Deck players report responsive controls. One of the most enthusiastic reviews comes from a backer with 469 hours logged across years of test builds, which tells you there's a game here worth that kind of time.

Rough in the way Early Access is rough

The complaints beyond co-op are the usual first-week list, and they're consistent enough to plan around.

Driving is the standout. Cars drift through slow corners, get wedged on scenery, and generally handle like they were implemented last. Given the map's size, driving is not optional, so this matters more than it would in a game with a smaller footprint.

Quest progression stalls. More than one player has landed on the same workaround — save, quit, reload, and the stuck objective advances. That's a real bug with a known shape, which is usually the kind that gets fixed quickly, but it's live right now.

Onboarding is thin: figuring out something as basic as where hay comes from sends new players to a search engine. And there are the usual launch oddities you'd expect four days in, including players falling through the world.

The one-hour and six-hour problem

Here's the split that should shape how you read the 59%.

The English negative reviews have a median playtime of one hour. The positives sit at six, with a long tail into the hundreds. That pattern — quick bounces on one side, invested players on the other — is common at launch, but the causes here are specific rather than vague. People bought it for co-op, discovered the structure inside twenty minutes, and refunded. That's not a failure to give the game a chance; it's a purchase that was mis-set by expectation before it began.

The positive reviews, meanwhile, are unusually clear-eyed. The recurring note isn't "this is great" — it's "this is Early Access, it has real problems, and it's going in the right direction." That's a healthier kind of enthusiasm than a launch-week 90% built on goodwill, and it's why this review lands where it does rather than lower.

The price is the other half of the equation. Nearly thirty-five New Zealand dollars for a build in this state is ambitious, and a visible slice of the negativity is really about value rather than design. An Early Access game gets latitude on bugs; it gets less latitude when it's priced like a finished one.

Verdict

The Ranchers is a promising game having a rough week, and most of the roughness is fixable — driving can be retuned, quests can be unstuck, tutorials can be written. Whether the co-op structure changes is a bigger question, because it's architectural rather than cosmetic, and it's the thing most of the disappointed buyers actually wanted.

If you play farming sims alone and enjoy watching a game grow, it's a reasonable buy now and likely a good one in a year. If you're buying it to farm alongside someone else as equals, wait for a patch note that says so explicitly, because right now you'll be the farmhand.

Players who want a world that keeps growing between sessions — and who'd rather share it than visit it — may also enjoy Wanderer.