Node farm is an interesting if not flawed automation-based idle game where you setup farms on various islands in order to produce foods in order to ‘defeat’ a boss and move on to the next one, unlocking recipes and nodes along the way. I had issues with my understanding of how the game’s mechanics worked and with the progression systems, but overall I had an okay time with it!
Launching the game, I already was a bit wary because the first thing I saw hitting play was a huge block of text, alongside links to watch youtube videos about controls and basic mechanics, then the new game menu asked me the game mode and difficulty modifiers, I kinda wish I had launched into the “classic” game experience immediately. After that the tutorialization is okay, the game tells you the core mechanics of placing nodes on the island; farmer nodes move water to seed nodes and then move the crops to market nodes, for instance.
You get money by selling your crops and other resources, which you then use to buy more nodes (and later on, upgrades that impact nodes around them), until you get to buy a Boss island which will require you to cook and deliver a certain number of recipes. At least you’re not timed, so it’s not a race to be as efficient as possible, and you can take your time. Cooking requires you to carry certain ingredients through specific nodes (boiling, mixing, canning, etc.) to a Cook node, where everything gets transformed into the required food. If you mess up somewhere, you’ll get a litany of error messages and you’ll need to figure out what went wrong.
Sometimes it’s obvious, but sometimes I just didn’t understood how the roads between nodes worked, trying to setup everything correctly with very little feedback on why resources didn’t go from node A to B, trying to remove everything and resetup my nodes was a bit frustrating. Sometimes the wrong resources would go through roads, sometimes nothing would move, that kind of thing! You still have a few options to setup logic gates or blocking resources of certain types from going in roads, but that just felt like it would be more complicated to understand than just having my simple systems work.
After defeating a few bosses and making a few recipes, you get ascension points which are then used to restart with a few bonuses. “A few” is sadly a misnomer, because every time I restarted, I could buy about all the upgrades on the next page of nodes, which was overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time. I really wished each upgrade was more impactful and you had time to appreciate how your farm was improved by having it, leaving the time to the upgrades to “breathe” before you get new ones; As it was, I just got everything and there were both too many things for me to appreciate, and they all did very little (as far as I could say)
So after a few ascensions I stopped. I saw where the game was going, with recipes taking more and more steps and resources types to create more complex island setups in order to feed the next boss; And that was fine for me, I was good with the time I had spent on Node Farm. If you enjoy automation-type games, I think you should give this a shot, but you might want to be ready to spend more brainpower on this than I had!
