Switch

Published on April 16th, 2024 | by Daniel

Lawn Mowing Simulator Switch Review!

Ever felt like mowing the lawn in real life just isn’t fun anymore? Sick of your old 2-stroke push mower and wish you had a sweet ride on a mower? Well dream no longer, Lawn Mowing Simulator has got you covered. Create a company not unlike Jim’s Mowing and take up contracts big and small, start as a small company and grow your business until you have a mowing empire. Hire employees, upgrade and buy bigger and better equipment, company HQs and more! Who needs to touch grass, when you can cut it in Lawn Mowing Simulator!

Gameplay

It’s as simple as it sounds, as soon as you hit the main screen, you’re presented with a few game modes, Career, Quick Mow, Challenge and Free Mow. All of them with the same basic objective, cut grass. In a game about mowing lawns? No way! Jokes aside though, I’ll break down the modes in detail below:

Career

Beginning with designing a company and a playable character. Everything is simple and easy, pick from a range of logos, design a work uniform and choose from a range of pre-built basic character designs which you’ll never really see much outside of the menus. After you’ve got your business name, logo and character sorted out, it’s time to pick a mower and a line trimmer. To start with, you’re presented with three different mowers, all of varying styles but with a unique gimmick that makes each one suit a different role.

The cheapest of the three has a grass collector pre-attached, so that you don’t have to worry about collecting the cut grass after mowing. The middle option has a side discharge for grass clippings and is designed for tight spaces and the most expensive choice has a mulcher function. All of them are petrol powered, limiting them to jobs that don’t require the use of an eco mower. The first two are rather similar in operation, however you’ll come across some jobs that require the use of a mower that features a mulcher function. The mulcher mower, can do every job the other two starting mowers can, as well as its own special requirements, but it practically takes up all the allotted funds you start with.

After you choose a mower, it’s time to choose a line trimmer. The only thing that matters here is the choice to be eco or petrol, as some jobs require eco equipment only. Apart from that the main difference is cutting width and length of fuel/battery life. You’re given the ability to test all the available mowers and trimmers to get a feel for how they all handle and which one suits you best. I ended up choosing the cheaper of both options, because they felt a little bit easier to control and also meant I had spare money to put out an advertisement or two.

Why go out and touch real grass, when you can cut it virtually?

After choosing my equipment it was time for my first contract. So far I’ve encountered a few different contract types, the two main ones are mowing and trash collection:

Trash collection is incredibly simple, walk around a camping site, collect trash, get a reputation and a small amount of money. These contracts are incredibly easy and are mostly there just to provide a nice break from the repetition of mowing contracts and provide a decent boost to reputation. They don’t give out much money, but are quick and actually quite relaxing to complete after a long mowing session or two.

Mowing contracts can have a number of different restrictions, sometimes one or the other, sometimes both. The two I’ve seen thus far are petrol with or without mulcher or eco, again with or without mulcher. I’m yet to see if there are more restrictions, I’m about 20 contracts into the career mode but I haven’t seen any new requirements. At the start of each contract, you are given the opportunity to complete a ground check. Given a time limit to do so, with the aim to find and remove all items that might cause damage to your mower. Bonus money can be earned with a faster clear time for both ground check and mowing modes. But you can be penalised for a few things too, drive recklessly and you can damage the ground, drive too close to the flower beds and you might destroy some flowers. These and more, can detract from your earnings at the end, plus the cost of maintenance and fuel for your vehicles.

As you earn money, you can choose to upgrade your HQ to get more slots, or straight up buy a bigger one, which costs a lot of money. You could take out a loan, but be careful you’re earning enough money from contracts weekly to cover the cost and still make a profit. Once you upgrade, you can start hiring new employees and buying more equipment for them to use. Allowing you to complete multiple contracts at once and earn even more money. Employees have a skill level when starting out and an expected salary, just make sure you can afford to hire staff before doing so. You can also buy more mowers and trimmers as you rank up, some you can even buy attachments for! Grow your business and grow your lawn mowing empire!

Quick Mow

As it sounds, quick mow is a random contract. Choose between small or large contracts; with small contracts set to take 10-30 minutes and larger ones designed to take 30-60 minutes. Great for a quick hit after a long day. Pick a small or large contract, don’t stress about the small stuff and get right down to the grass cutting business. I used this feature once or twice, I found it was neat to not worry about having to choose the specifics of a contract. But it paled in comparison to other modes because they’d get boring quite quickly, career mode does the same thing by setting specific conditions per contract and you can just pick whichever one you like rather than leaving it to fate.

Challenge Mow

As the name suggests, these are contracts with incredibly specific conditions where you’re given a scenario and must manage to complete the challenge. Often at a severe disadvantage. The two condition types I have unlocked at the moment (there may be more but I’m not sure) are fuel and time limiters. Basically, complete the tasks provided within the fuel or time limitations. Of the two types I actually found the time challenges harder at first, as I was still getting the hang of the controls and the nuances. After getting used to it however, I began to figure out ways to cut grass more efficiently, but that came at an increased fuel cost. Neither modes were impossible, some challenges really made me work hard, others I breezed through. So I’d say a decent balance in difficulty levels across both modes.

Free Mow

If it looks like a free mow, sounds like a free mow, it’s probably a free mow. Once again, as obvious as the name implies the free mow mode allows you to pick any unlocked location, use any unlocked equipment, regardless of whether you’ve bought it in career or not. Set yourself your own list of requirements; time limit, grass height limit, weather, damage settings, fuel levels and even the option to do a ground check before mowing or not. If you choose no ground check, there will be no items on the lawn that can cause damage to your mower. It’s a good way to test new vehicles and equipment that you’ve unlocked via career mode but don’t have the necessary funds to buy right away. To see which mowers and trimmers you might want to upgrade to when you earn the capital required.

Graphics & Audio

Normally, I’d separate these two categories to give them their own space to shine. However, there’s actually not a lot to be said about the switch version in either of these two categories to really waste the space on separating them.

For graphics, the menus have a lot of still imagery, the nature of that giving them the ability to have quality images lining all the various menu panels. It makes for a greater navigating experience and goes to show the developers wanted to make the most of what limited tools the switch provides them in such a small screen. Gameplay graphics themselves are nothing to write home about, textures are pretty average at best and sometimes can be difficult to see where the last bits of uncut grass is once the majority of the lawn is mowed. There’s not enough colour and texture differentiation to immediately determine what’s cut-able and what’s already been cut.

Buildings and lawn designs whilst unique for the most part, are rather poorly designed, I’ve seen older games with better graphics on the Switch. So one does wonder where their budget went to. That is until you look at the mowers themselves, as they’re clearly the star of this game. All of them have pretty detailed designs and have their own unique look and feel. The frame rate of the game is slow and can be choppy at times when powering through densest parts of the lawn, the game does perform a lot better when docked, but I can’t say it looks any better, because it really doesn’t.

Audio meanwhile, is practically non-existent. There’s the simplest of country style rock music for the menus that never changes as you navigate through them and gets very, very repetitive over time. So much so, that I found I straight up muted the music after a while of hearing it grate on my ears. There’s no voice acting, which is a pro and a con. Of course I don’t think there’s ever really been voice acting in a Simulator series game, except maybe Flight Simulator for obvious reasons. And the game audio is very simplistic. You have generic lawn mower sound, generic line trimmer sound, ambient birds and wind sounds. That’s it. Literally, that’s all. So while the sounds fit the genre of game, it quickly becomes very much, just white noise to me after a while. There’s no music when actually in a contract, there’s only one repetitive song in the menus, no licenced music, basic ambience. And that’s pretty disappointing, I understand that devs wanted to make it all about the content and less about what supports the content. But for me, little things like these can make or break my experience.

Final Thoughts

Lawn Mowing Simulator, is a good game. That’s it.

It’s not got the craziest graphics, it’s not got the coolest soundtrack, it’s not got voice acted content or crazy in depth company statistics. It is, at its core. A game all about peace, tranquility and the relaxing dream of riding on a ride-on mower. When I looked past all its flaws, I found myself really enjoying my time on the game. Being able to come home from a busy day of work and just relax with some oddly therapeutic mowing of the lawns, was a very welcome change to my normal stress relievers in the form of first person shooters.

Is it a game I would go out and buy? No, I find that it lacks a lot of polish and I love games that are well polished masterpieces. But I can appreciate a simple, clean and fun idea where I can switch off my brain and just enjoy the content. I’d probably consider buying it on PC if and when it goes on sale, if only to see what kind of mods the community makes with games like these. It was a good change of pace from the games I normally play, but it’s not a game I would sink a lot of hours into.

[Amendment]: After seeing content from the PC and PS5 versions, I can safely say that it is literally an entirely different game. My points still stand regarding the lackluster audio, but the graphics are on a whole other level. Even on my Switch OLED model, the graphics simply don’t impress me. But I would absolutely buy the game, in fact, I probably will, on PC just because of the difference in graphics. I highly recommend that if you are considering this game, do not buy it on the Switch, get it on PS5 or PC.

My ratings below reflect my experience playing the game on Switch only.

Game Details

Game Genre – Simulation
Developers – Skyhook Games
Publishers – Curve Games, Astragon
Rating – General
Year of Release – 2024
Platforms – PC (Steam), PS4/5, Xbox One/Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, GeForce Now
Mode(s) of Play – Single

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About the Author

Daniel Hi I'm Dan! 33 and Non-Binary. When I'm not writing reviews. I like to get deeply immersed in the lore of an mmo or rpg, cruise the forest or coastal roads of Victoria, watch anime, read manga, build model kits and do a bit of sketching on the side.

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