Ranch Simulator is a good concept. It’s actually pretty fun when you play co-op, the mechanics are simple and easy to understand, and overall it feels like a Flash game on steroids, despite being made in Unreal Engine.
Unfortunately, that’s where most of the good things end.
The game has some serious FPS issues. It can run at 100–150 FPS one moment, and then suddenly freeze or drop frames like crazy. The optimization is just not great.
There are also quite a few bugs. One of the more recent ones that a friend and I found happens when you attach a small trailer to the UTV. As soon as someone starts driving, the UTV starts spinning and bouncing around like crazy. It’s pretty funny the first time you see it, but obviously it gets annoying.
There are also some AI-related elements that feel pretty poorly implemented. The AI can behave strangely and doesn’t always feel very polished, which makes the game feel even more unfinished.
And then there’s the radio. The radio is honestly terrible. The music gets repetitive very quickly, and after a while it becomes more annoying than enjoyable. It feels like one of those features that was added just to have something playing in the background rather than something you’d actually want to listen to.
The gameplay itself is also painfully slow in a lot of places. If you decide to play solo, be prepared to have a lot of patience. The tasks become repetitive pretty quickly, and most of the quests are basically the same thing over and over again. After a while, it starts to feel more like a chore than an actual game.
If the game were still in Early Access, I probably wouldn’t complain as much about these issues. But it’s been fully released, and the fact that it still has such noticeable optimization problems, bugs, and other unfinished-feeling elements is pretty disappointing.
Overall, Ranch Simulator has a good idea and can definitely be fun, especially with friends, but the poor optimization, bugs, repetitive gameplay, questionable AI, and awful radio really hold it back.**
