Death Tractor is a short and simple corn harvesting simulator with a twist; you're endlessly hunted by possessed, demonic tractors and fellow harvesters. The game is essentially one giant death match, and the one who gets out with the most corn and manages to stay alive wins.
The developers have displayed their obvious sense of humor towards this obvious novelty game right within the store page description. Death Tractor is not a title meant to be taken seriously, but there is a fine line between decent and awful joke games. Unfortunately, this title is one that falls right in the middle. A few factors have caused me to press the dreaded thumbs down button.
Maps, there is an incredible lack of them. By lack of maps, I mean there is only one that comes with different flavors of the fence that houses the large rectangular patch of corn field. You'll run around in a giant square most of the time as you harvest your corn, daring only to venture into the middle if you're feeling particularly lucky enough to avoid the tractors of death. This stale, repetitive pattern grows old quick and yet there is so much more potential to maps that could be created.
Sound effects are minimal and music is non-existent, except for when you die. You'll be hearing the same hum of the tractors, their beeping horns, and your sickle for the entire five minute duration of each match that you play. These minimalistic attributes only further push the mundane factor up on the scale of "growing bored, quickly". Although on a positive note, the game only has three button functions; left click to use your hand-held agricultural tool, ESC to return to the menu after death, and space bar after you've been knocked down by an opponent.
The mechanics are equally as simplistic; the more corn you carry, the slower you become. The slower you become, the higher chance of you ending up as tractor food. So how does one get rid of the corn they've harvested, you ask? Why, by dumping it into the back of pickup trucks lined around the outside of the map. The more corn you harvest, the higher your score will go. However, the opponents around you can also dump their corn into these trucks, and once a truck is full it leaves for an amount of time. If no trucks are present, and you're loaded down, you're pretty much screwed.
You're also screwed if you spawn in the wrong place at the beginning of the game, as tractors spawn just as randomly as you do. You can be dead before you even begin. Usually, one can tell when a death machine is nearby due to the headlights and honking of its horn; this is not always the case, and you may die without ever having seen a giant 20ft tractor coming for you. Also, if an opponent knocks you down, it takes about 5-10 seconds to recover, during which time a tractor may just run you over. In short, you're going to die... a lot. On the bright side, you can also screw over opponents by knocking them down with your sickle; this in turn steals an amount of their corn. This may also cause them to become tractor chow.
Death Tractor kept me entertained for all of an hour and a half until I got supremely bored with it. This is also with getting a good majority of the achievements, and only playing to farm them. As you may have guessed, online is deader than you will be in this game. Luckily, the developers have implemented bots so that you can still get that full Death Tractor experience. I got this in some bundle, but there's absolutely no way this game is worth $4.49 CAD, $1.09 at best. Buy if you wish, but don't say that I didn't try to warn you of the monotony ahead.
Rating: 2.5/5.0 - It's not awful, but it's not great.The Horror Network
Steam Group:
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/thehorrornetworkSteam Curator:
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/thehorrornetwork#curation 2.5