Barn Finders

This game is pretty much the personification of the "work slop" genre. It sells itself on the premise of you have tasks to complete and a store to run, but it takes so many shortcuts with the mechanics that it almost feels like an asset flip at times. The biggest being that they could not manage to make any character walk, so they just teleport around with puffs of smoke. Not only can this be quite distracting, and pretty bad to watch, sometimes to characters will attempt to jump to nearly the same point in your store, making one of them fail to arrive even though they show up on the GUI. At least, that's the best explanation I have for why it happens, as there are two shelves where people stand in the same spot and that spot has always been full when I started to pay attention to it in relation to that bug. Beyond that obvious bit of nonsense, the game has several other bugs as well. There are times when doors will not open that should, which means you cannot carry some items out becuase they won't fit through standard doors. The developers know of this bug, and six years ago said they'd fix if. Even after two DLC released, it still exists. The developers "solved" this by giving you the ability to simply tag items to send them to your car automatically after a few seconds. Though that also comes into place when you have areas of maps that take you through warp points, such as being rowed to an island. At that point, the tagging items for transport becomes mandatory. There is no real attempt to balance the game. You can use an axe to destroy "junk" items and make them drop an increasing amount of 'salvage' items as you upgrade the axe. These salvage items can then be traded for $10 each... bought or sold for the same amount. It is not unreasonable to have a few thousand of these by the end. So every map comes down to cleaning up by destroying almost everything (you usually want to try to keep something around to jump up on if it becomes necessary), and picking up everything else you can. A "cleaning" game, if you will. Some of the items you do get head back to your shop. Your shop is a mess. There are a few stations you need to "upgrade" (read: buy) for functionality, such as cleaning or repairs. each one bein an awful 'minigame', the repair one by far the worst of the two as the item bounces up and down in station which can make it hard to keep your aim on the repair spots - which is necessary to fix them. It's really bad when using a controller. There is also an assembly station, as some items need to be found in parts and put together. There's not really an advantage to this, other than you do get a single reasonably priced item, if you aren't drowning in cash by the half way point of the game. Your shop has 3 small shelves, two wall displays - one large, one small, and 6 large item displays. Some of them will need to be built before use. You can upgrade these as well, if you wish. All that does is change the graphics (and in the case of at least one item, make it clip through the display when you've got it out). It doesn't bring more people to your store, it doesn't make them more likely to haggle or raise the price, it doesn't let you put more items on display - other than initially building some of the displays in the first place. It's just there to waste your money. There is a haggling mechanic. It is literally just a bar that goes back and forth and you want to hit it when it's max. Though even then sometimes the customer will not accept the change in price. The bar also does not necessarily match with what you will hit, a there are times when the bar was clearly in one zone, and a different zone activated for me. The graphics went out of sync. Something that is fatal in a timing game like that. Customers will also often let you haggle repeatedly. But not in a real "haggling" way where you have a price, they have a price, and you're trying to meet in the middle. The "haggle" mechanic just raises (or lower) the price on a failure... and then you can ask to do it agian. Quite a ♥♥♥♥ move to say "No, I want x for this.. on second thought, since i know you'll agree to that price, how about paying this much more instead?" Also, for the small shelves, customers will only ever purchase the first most item on the shelf. There is no randomization there. Whatever's in the lowest number position is what will sell. Because the developers couldn't figure out how to make them purchase something else on the shelf randomly, or based on personal preferences. Yes, the very limited selection of customers proports to have preferences on what they will buy, I have not seen this in action. They can also sell items to you, with the same haggling system. This is done by having one more standing point outside the store. With that point, there appears to be a list of what items can be sold that day, and every customer cycle will spawn one seller as well as the buyers until there's nobody left to sell you something. The maps start out fairly basic, but get wildly sprawling and complex after a while. A little too sprawling and complex, since you're supposed to find everything. Making you run through multiple transport methods to find everything gets tedious, not fun. Even when you have the item to find items you're missing, it can glitch a bit. It'll "find" big items you've already tagged to tow, and it ONLY finds items, not the collectables scattered about. Not that there's any point in getting the collectables. They do nothing for you. As for more instances of the developer's incomitance, achievements do not properly track things for triggering. Cleaning or repairing "everything" only increments a counter, and when you get duplicates sold in by customers it still increments. Even something as basic as given out cosmetics as rewards is flaws as your collection log posts a free vehicle skin every 40 redemptions. You get it every 30. And the bar will show up after you've collected them all and keep resetting. This game isn't good. It is he definition of slop, it is shovelware through and through. The only reason I decided to push through it was that I got it in a Humble Bundle that averaged out to around seventy five cents a game - And even then this one included both of its DLCs so it was the 'highest cost' of the bunch. At under a dollar, this game MIGHT be worth it. At anything more than that, pass. Even in this genre of 'work slop' you are flooded with options and you don't need to spend your time on this.