Cattle Country Reviews

Heard about this on a YT video about cozy games and was able to snag it on sale, but really it is worth full price. Word of advice - take care of those vultures before you start fishing!

I highly recommend this game! It can be extremely cozy like other farming games or you can have enemy's spawn in the over world or just the mine. There is also a pretty big world to explore, lots to forage and it is a cool country aspects. Another huge thing I love is it can be played on the steam deck! I am really enjoying it and cannot wait for more to be added! PS. Would love the ability to change the remap the controls!

Really enjoying the frontier vibes in this gorgeous game. Chill music, cute stories and fun minigames. Still has a few bugs and needs a little loving.

great game. BUT I feel like it's not polished enough in terms of characters and quests. all characters have like one line they keep repeating which make them boring and uninteresting. I hope the developers make some improvements to the dialogues in future updates. it's such a waste to neglect such minor yet important aspect of the game when you already have a game with great fundamentals.

I like the scenery and weather effects. You definitely have to interact with the villagers to get the game rolling. Some of the cut scenes are fun. The male bachelors are not pretty, but I suppose it's slim pickings in the old west? It also doesn't tell you who is married and who isn't. You can't sell crafted furniture, which is weird. I don't understand what the train depot does. There's no explanation. There are no explanations for festivals. That aside, foraging is great. The hunting and bandits are entertaining. There could be a little more danger to it. My hearts have never gone below like half of one. Some work just needs to be done for in game guidance since it's new and we don't have as many online resources to tell us everything.

I’m fully hooked on this game. It’s consuming all my spare time like a bad addiction, totally worth it. It's like Stardew Valley’s chill sibling that doesn't make you plant 800 parsnips before breakfast. I dedicated years to SV and have finally found the replacement. It lets me live out my off-the-grid dreams and gives you the outdoor frontier roaming feels. Huge kudos to the dev(s) for the ongoing updates—please don’t ghost us now that we’re emotionally codependent. And thank you for the guides… seriously, you're doing the lord’s work.

I'll start this off with a simple statement - I want this game to improve. I think it holds some potential to be a better game than it is in it's current state. That said, there's one overarching issue about this game... it's kind of boring. I've put hundreds of hours into Stardew Valley. What keeps me going back to that game? I'll nail down a few points and give a contrast to what CC does differently. 1. The sound: SDV has a fantastic sound track that both motivates you and allows you to get into the zone, just like good game music. In comparison: Cattle Country has some great music, but it's so low most of the time that I barely notice and other times it doesn't play at all. More music please! 2. The writing: SDV has narrative that was built into every level. Okay, not everything has a ton of depth to it, but it honestly felt like the effort was given to make it shine. In comparison: Cattle Country's writing is very, very shallow. There's repeat descriptions on every little thing. Characters repeat the same dialog over and over again, even in different times of day. 3. The story progression: This point isn't as clear at first because it presents you with a singular goal: new roof for the town hall. Then CC gives you another: become an official town. In my time playing, I hit the first goal, then meandered trying to figure out the second before giving up. SDV gives you an extremely clear goal, then many more smaller goals to keep you busy. 4. Hunting: a good skill that needs better on boarding for the player. Give the character a bow instead of just a gun. Or, put in a quest where you trade a bow for feathers, thus giving player motivation so start hunting with their handgun and a direction to where they can continue to improve. I'd also like to see it be more interesting as once you see deer explode to meat and leather more than twice it becomes boring. 5. Art: I'll be the first to admit the art in SDV is inconsistent, however it does have lots of it in more than one perspective. Characters and objects can only be seen from one direction, thus making everything feel stiff. I can forgive the mining being locked to that one front facing perspective; that was a mechanic decision that needs that stiff perspective to work. Now, here's some things CC does better than SDV 1. The Minigames during festivals are fun because they're actually minigames. 2. Fishing is very well done, and I normally hate fishing minigames. 3. You can turn off monsters spawning. I've heard people complain about SDV being good but not wanting to engage in any combat thus they choose to avoid it entirely. I would like seeing this disabling monster spawning when you start the game instead of buried in the start menu. I hope this helps you, the consumer, in making a decision in purchasing this game. To you the developer: I mean what I said, I want this game to be great. Please keep iterating on it and make it shine!

I've given this game a fair whack. Even though I'm giving the game a thumbs up because I do have fun, it's a very, very tepid thumbs up and I would say - be careful buying this, especially if you're into Stardew Valley. Consider why you play Stardew. Is it casual play, building farms and ticking boxes? Then Cattle Country is a good alternative. Is it because Stardew Valley has that but also challenging gameplay through the combat and late game content? Then... maybe not. you'll have to see some video of this and judge for yourself. Because Cattle Country is Stardew Valley but then with an Animal Crossing sauce and oversimplified game mechanics. It has some combat mechanics but it might have also not been there at all and you can even turn it off; it barely makes a difference in the game. It takes place in a western setting, so that means shootouts with bandits right? Well yeah... but I had only one happen per season and it's resolved with a mini game where you have to click a button in the right moment - most of the mini games work like that. Unless the frequency completely ramps up in the second year of play, I think they still have some tuning to do when it comes to this game because the whole western part of the game gets kind of lost. Just put bandits in the game as random spawns... why the dumb mini game? The game is full of baffling decisions like that I can only assume were made because they wanted things to work differently from Stardew. Not a bad goal... but know your limits. Stardew does a lot perfectly, which means if you don't copy it - you do it worse. The rest of the game is also quite dialed back compared to its granddaddy. NPCs are kind of wooden, they say the exact same things each day and don't acknowledge at all things that happen in the game. Having a baby for example is apparently a complete non-issue as it just does not come up at all outside of the heart event the birth takes place in. Characters you get maximum heart level with so you can marry them barely acknowledge you as a potential partner at all, you're just another person. Not even as a friend, their dialogue stays exactly the same. Mining... quite boring. Don't overdo it, take your time with it and go mining like every weekend or something when there is barely anything to do in the game. The main goal early game, after visiting the bank ASAP and completing the roof of the town hall, should be to get to heart level 3 with as many people as possible because it opens up things in the game and the mines do not help with that too much except for one character. Friendship is mostly controlled through gifting; that makes the core gameplay mechanic of this game being a collectathon. Grow as much stuff, forage as much stuff, craft as much stuff, buy as much stuff, mine as much stuff, smelt as much stuff. Rinse and repeat, day after day. Wines and jams get you a long way and compared to Stardew they're ridiculously easy to make in bulk. The highlight of the game are the heart events, of which there are not enough unfortunately to really tell a story. The game has some seriously diverse characters in the heart events; become friends with the school teacher as soon as possible, she's a piece of work. Which makes it all the more a shame that they turn into cardboard cutouts outside of said heart events. All in all, this has potential but the game does not feel finished yet. It is more of a sandbox version of the game this is supposed to become and the actual game is hidden inside heart events you have to grind your way to to. Casual to a point where even fans of casual games might start to find flaws, way too wooden. I hope it will have many patches to come to fill in the blanks more.

This is tough because I enjoy this game and am definitely still playing - that said, the bugs, the lack of direction, the crazy gameplay imbalance - it is shocking that this game was released on all platforms and is not currently in early access/beta or even alpha testing. It feels like the developers did their own testing and did not conduct real end-to-end or user acceptance and integration testing of the entire game. And that is completely beside the almost total lack of quality of life and automation progression that is key to a farm/life sim game, which could be more excused in the first version of a game if that were the only major issue. Just off the top of my head - tool hit placement sporadically bugs out; inventory duplicating/disappearing (particularly tools when upgrading); festivals fail to trigger on some(?) circumstances; farm animals and wild animals walk out of bounds/through builds/through cliffs/randomly over fences; ghost items block tiles after being re/moved; some items can be picked up (farm animal products) when inventory is full, causing them to disappear; item stacks over 9999 do not count or double. Some furniture can't be rotated, some buildings can't be moved...there are so many more, but these are what I can think of right now. As far as quality of life, some major ones that should have been done pre-release are - allowing resolution change on Steam Deck (it's unchangeable from a small/hard to see size); notes/letters/ANYTHING that explain mechanics and gameplay aspects (why do my crops die? why is there a drought? why can't I get this animal/tool/upgrade/recipe? For a game that relies HEAVILY on gifting and friendship with villages, their dialog is tiny and redundant. Clearly defined and explained buffs - I have no idea what any buff does besides speed and I've just started year 3. Fishing and hunting seems imbalanced vs the other skills. Further, the highest quality tools do not scale with the game - the game's reliance on manual everything, forever, is not helped with them. Mining with the diamond pickaxe below level 500 is the same as mining level 1 with the first tool - far too tedious when you had to spend a quarter of your day manually feeding/collecting your animals and crops. No automation for animals or farming outside of sprinklers, which don't work for a period of the summer due to drought. You can literally just buy all the animal products for far less hassle than having animals. I can only hope that unlike other game developers, they focus on fixing what they have rather than rushing out new content (looking at you Sun Haven). The tl;dr is if I didn't have so much idea of how these games go from playing other similar games, I'd have quickly given up for the total lack of direction in this game.

This is a personal thing for me, but I wish the game had some kind of direction, purpose, storyline?? It would be a great game if I knew why I was playing it. I am all for cozy games but... I still want something to work towards, some story to discover, Something? Its just a personal thing. If you want a game that has no direction other than "Do whatever you want all the time" its great. But there are only so many times you can spend a day digging in a mine or foraging the fields just to do it..