Monster Harvest Review – When Stardew Met Pokemon (PS4)

The world can always use more farming games, right? How about one that takes everything you love about them and tosses it into a blender with monster battlers? Throw in a dash of weird science, seasonal festivals, and an evil corporation threatening the town; That’s Monster Harvest in a nutshell.

Monster Harvest Review – Back on the Farm

As they do, Monster Harvest begins with a letter in the mail. Due to an increase in experiments, your uncle Professor Spark can no longer take care of his farm and he’s invited you to run the place. With some basic tools and a small stipend, you’ll set to it using mechanics you probably spent way too many hours with in Stardew Valley. Pick up some seeds from the General Store, till the land, plant and water your new plants until the produce fruits and veggies. But here comes the twist! Professor Spark wants you to apply colorful slimes to your plants every now and then. Why? Because once the slimed plant is ready to harvest, it becomes a plant animal hybrid—a Planimal, if you will. Planimals are loyal creatures. They will follow you around town as you explore, and should you find yourself in trouble, they will fight (and die) to keep you safe.

There are three growing seasons, each consisting of three weeks at seven days. Each season has four seed varieties to harvest and unique foraging items to collect. Post the items you wish to sell to the commission board on your farm to earn more spending cash. Selling a new item via the commission board have the added perk of being marked off on the notice board at the center of town. As you complete each section you unlock bonuses. Most of these bonuses boost your farming tools’ performance. Once you complete the entire board the bunker in the bottom left section of the farm opens up.

There are three slimes to use on your crops. The most important is the red one; red slimes (and its variations) applied to plants turn them into fighting planimals. A planimal pen sits to the east of your house. Since you can only keep six planimals with you at once and only one of each type, if you grow duplicates they will be sent to the pen. Green slime will speed up the growth process so the plant is immediately ready to harvest. I recommend using the green slime when you’re low on planimals in your party. Blue slimed crops turn into livestock if you use the basic slime or into a mount if you use an upgraded slime type. Livestock take time to grow up before producing additional items but mounts are ready to use as soon as you pick them. You must have the barn built for livestock and the stable in order to keep them on the farm. If ever you want to sell a stored planimal, simply visit the notice board for that building, scroll to the one you want to sell, and click that $ button.

In addition to planting and harvesting, production equipment such as pickler and jamming machines can eventually be crafted. Recipes for these machines are earned when you level up, so I recommend foraging and expending all of your stamina early on. Processed items net you more cash and more cash means better tools and buildings. You can find the metals needed within the town’s dungeon.

Monster Harvest Review – I Choose You, Planimal!

It wouldn’t be a farming game without some sort of Big Bad threatening your new town. Monster Harvest‘s comes in the form of SlimeCo. SlimeCo moved into town and is siphoning slimes from the town dungeon for some nefarious reason. Professor Spark wants you to find out what SlimeCo is scheming and allows you access to the dungeons. But only in the evenings! The area is closed off during the day and nights when there’s a town event.

Dungeon diving is how you obtain precious metals. Iron, gold, titanium, and mythic ores are ready to be mined from these tunnels. Bring a few planimals and some food to refill your stamina so you can fill your pockets to the brim. Stamina will only be used for harvesting materials, but if all of your planimals die in the field it will wipe you out and wake up at the clinic. The dungeons aren’t particularly deep, only five levels all told, but depending on how you navigate the rooms you could be there a while.

The map layout is randomly generated each night so you’ll never encounter the same map. If a room has an enemy to battle, there’s only ever one to worry about. Now it’s time to battle it out Pokemon style. Battles are turn based and attacks are based on your planimal’s level. There are basic attacks, afflictions, and boosting abilities. A battle lasts until you either defeat the enemy or all of your planimals are dead. At the end of a fight you can obtain healing items or even seasonal seeds. This makes running the dungeon a fantastic way to boost your crop. You’ll know you’ve reached the end of a level when you enter a room with a chest in the middle. You must defeat the monster in the room in order to open the chest and move further in.

Monster Harvest is far from perfect. As of right now the town events seem pointless. In your first year you can buy some seeds here which then makes them available at the general store. There’s also a few unique furnishings at each one. But I can’t display my planimals or submit my best jar of pickles to win prizes. It feels like these just weren’t ready for launch and may be patched in later. I also noticed some user interface problems. Once I expanded my barn to hold eight livestock the notice board inside where you manage them stopped scrolling properly and it glitched to show the “select” outline outside of the actual menu.

But most annoying of all is how spongy the controls are within the inventory/journal menu. It didn’t matter whether I used the stick or the D-pad. Sometimes the controls would not register. Other times it registered a single push as two or three or horizontal when I wanted to go vertical. It’s frustrating when you just want to organize a storage chest and the things you don’t want to select get moved about or you panic that you deleted a stack of gold ore somehow.

Perhaps the biggest downside is that, as of right now, Monster Harvest isn’t particularly long for a farming sim game. I think I finished it in just over twenty hours or so. To be fair, I was grinding so I could write this review, but by the time I finished the first year in-game, I had already reached my maximum XP cap and unlocked the bunker. In the first week of Year Two I had fully upgraded all of my tools and had enough materials (just short on cash) to finish upgrading all of my farm buildings. In week two I beat the SlimeCo boss. If the developer doesn’t have plans to make events a real part of the game or expand the story and dungeons, this unique experience just isn’t worth a full price investment.

Monster Harvest review code provided by publisher. Version 1.03 reviewed on PlayStation 5. For more information on scoring please see our Review Policy.