The Ranchers is an open-world farming sim game where you move to Sunvale City and build a farm, grow crops, and drive around the city. Read our review of the Early Access to find out what it does right, what it doesn’t and our overall thoughts.
Everything We Know About The Ranchers
The Ranchers Plot
The Ranchers sees your player character moving to a fresh start in Sunvale City, where you earn a plot of land to till and form into your own serene farming ranch. Along the way you’ll meet with a colorful cast of characters, from the city mayor to your neighbors and friends, where you can form friendships and help them out with their problems.
The Ranchers Gameplay
The Ranchers is an open-world farming and life-sim which focuses on your player character building a farm in the outskirts of Sunvale City. Players can plant and harvest crops, build homes, and tend to farm animals, while also exploring the open-world to find mines full of minerals and monsters. Outside of this, players can also form bonds with NPCs, explore shops, and drive around the city.
The Ranchers Release Date
The Ranchers is releasing as an Early Access title on July 31, 2026 for Steam.
The Ranchers Review (Early Access) | Unique Farming Sim Planting Seeds of Potential
Grand Theft Autumn: SunVale City
Every farming sim game has its hook. The genre is defined by such a fundamental gameplay loop, one infinitely more rigid than other genres because of its direct ties to real world principles. Eventually, games within the space need to have their unique, standout feature, whether its Stardew Valley’s rich, cozy worldbuilding and characters or Moonlight Peaks’ cutesy horror aesthetic. For The Ranchers, it’s the ability to hotwire a car and fight off monsters in caves with machine guns.
The Ranchers takes farming sims, specifically the open-world style popularized by landmark series like Harvest Moon, and injects a healthy dose of GTA-esque chaos into it. The result is a game with a lot of heart and vision, but one that still remains deeply rough around the edges.
The Ranchers succeeds at recreating the farming sim gameplay loop that remains beloved and cozily captivating, and does enough to make it stand out from the crowd. However, it’s definitely a game that needs a little more work, and with the current roadmap I can only hope that what’s coming next improves on an already promising foundation. Overall, it's already fun, but with a bit more growth in the fields and the healthy city air it could be something special.
Planting Seeds for a Great Farming Experience
The Ranchers has all the landmarks of a good farming sim. It has a lot of creativity and freedom that it grants players in building their farms, the general gameplay loop of the genre is present, and a colorful cast of characters is here to know and form friendships with. It does a lot of unique things too, from the non-farming exploration to the minutia of its resource management.
As a newcomer to SunVale City, your player character is welcomed to your prospective ranch by your friend Meriam and the mayor Victor, who previously owned the land. Your ranch, as it appears before your arrival, is overrun with trees, rocks, and uneven foliage. Still, it's a good place to start, and the first few long days in The Ranchers’ opening sequence remains cozy and nice.
The Ranchers very clearly wants its players to be very deliberate with their time and decision making. The first few hours of the game are a tad slow, while there aren’t many consequences for taking multiple days to complete certain quests. Meanwhile, the game’s day/night system runs quite fast, averaging around 20 minutes before the day ends and your character passes out. For the most part, this is the correct approach to a game of this scale, and The Ranchers still works as a result.
Farming itself is tied to exploring the city of SunVale, with seeds, animals, and valuable minerals only being accessible by going out of your way to interact with shops and areas of interest around the map. This, alongside decorating and building on the ranch, are mediated on a grid-based system, but some inconsistencies with tools means that you might accidentally break something you didn’t mean to.
Alongside its day/night cycle, though, The Ranchers also places a heavy emphasis on resource management. While this is common for farming sims, The Ranchers looks into the minutia of every day so closely that it becomes an entirely new tightrope act. Players are billed for their power and water use at the end of every day, while driving includes an entire gas meter that must be filled up when empty.
Crafting, meanwhile, is where some of the flaws start to show. While players have a wide array of things they can craft, the way that this is done can feel clunky and unintuitive. Instead of being able to build multiple of the same structures at once, for instance, the game has you manually re-selecting the item you want to craft just to place it down again. It can be quite tedious, but I found that playing on mouse and keyboard alleviates this somewhat.
All this, ultimately, adds up to a well-realized farming system that still lets players build their farms however they wish. It’s a fun time, but the unique stuff that The Ranchers offers in this area really comes down to the details. The real thing that sets the game apart is its open world city setting, which is also unfortunately where a lot of the issues lie.
The World is Still A Little Underripe
Conceptually, The Ranchers’ GTA take on farming sims is brilliant. The juxtaposition between the calming, cozy nature of farming and the chaos of the criminal open world is a recipe for hilarious, fun experience, and to that end The Ranchers does at least make a valiant attempt to fulfill it. However, possibly due to the game’s early state in development, that end of The Ranchers feels a bit underripe.
This starts with the driving, which is undoubtedly the weakest part of the game so far. Driving isn’t an essential part of The Ranchers, but with its open world and long roads its certainly one that players are incentivized to interact with. The cars, unfortunately, do not control well at all. They’re somehow too heavy but also too slippery, and can either oversteer so hard you hit a wall or refuse to turn at all.
The driving physics in The Ranchers reminds me a lot of GTA IV’s, another controversial driving system which I actually enjoyed, but without the sense of speed or weight that tied its flaws together. No amount of fun car name parodies could take away from just how janky and off-putting the driving felt, which incentivized me to just drive like a maniac throughout the game anyway.
On that note, the "open world freedom" feels like an afterthought so far. Yes, your player character isn’t a criminal (or at least, the story posits that they’re just a normal guy looking for a change of pace). He has ties to the mayor, and the city is so heavily policed you’d think there was some kind of crime syndicate freely walking around. However, whether you’re hijacking cars or hitting people with them, what you get in return isn’t entirely exciting or consequential.
There is a hacking system to hotwire cars, which is a fun little timing-based minigame. You can accumulate a Wanted level, which escalates in intensity much like its triple A predecessor, but the consequences range from having to pay a small fee to spending a few nights in prison. If you do what I did, set aside a day to rampage and then reset the game if you get caught,
nothing really gets lost.
On the legal end, it’s hard to justify exploring the city too apart from what it incentivizes with farming. You can explore new shops to buy clothes and supplies, while mines in the outskirts of the city hold a lot of minerals to collect and sell for massive profit. Otherwise, NPCs feel indistinct and not particularly interesting, with their dialogue boxes being massively long for what they set out to say.
Even the settings aren’t too fleshed out yet, as of writing. There’s currently no option to change your keyboard binds apart from a few presets, which could leave players having to figure out how the controls work entirely on their own. The game still has standard controls, and the game does teach you these whenever they’re relevant, but it’s a shockingly absent accessibility feature all the same.
This, ultimately, isn’t indicative of an irredeemably negative experience. Even if the driving isn’t great for instance, the fact that it's there at all makes exploration that much more fun. It even leads to a lot of hilarious emergent moments, like the time I rammed into another car’s back bumper and had their car on top of mine. The core concept of the game still shines through even with these flaws, but a great gameplay loop that gives each of these factors a chance to shine interdependently is a number of tweaks away.
Sweeter than An Ear of Corn
Generally, The Ranchers has a pretty unique aesthetic direction. It has the player using a top-down perspective like old-school GTA, which works extremely well for farming and building. The UI is also fun, especially with the phone mechanic and how specific apps serve as parodies of existing apps.
Art-style wise, the game implements a rugged 3D pixel-art style that mostly works, especially when it comes to the way farms are laid out and look. However, it does make character proportions quite uncanny, specifically with how character models are shaped. This also affects how they move and is an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise nice art style.
What absolutely surprised me and stole the show, though, was its soundtrack. The Ranchers’ soundtrack is this odd mix of country and ambient music, which is standard for a farming game, alongside jazz and funk music. The jazz and funk specifically appear on certain radio stations, and what's present are genuinely great pastiches of the genre. As a musician raised on the greats of both genres, like Prince, Stevie, or Coltrane, I’m particularly picky about their homages, which just makes their relatively great execution all the better.
To this end, The Ranchers’ ability to constantly surprise me is what kept me going during my playthrough so far. Its lack of polish and missing features aside, just the discovery phase of going "oh, I could do that?" or *"oh, the game is doing this?" every so often while exploring the game was a load of fun. It injects some intrigue into a genre that, for better or worse, thrives off of its rigidity, and I can’t wait to see what gets added next.
Game8 Reviews
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The Ranchers Product Information
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| Title | THE RANCHERS |
|---|---|
| Release Date | July 31, 2026 (Early Access) |
| Developer | RedPilz Studio |
| Publisher | Publisher_here |
| Supported Platforms | PC, MacOS (Steam) |
| Genre | Simulation, Open World |
| Number of Players | 1-4 |
| ESRB Rating | NA |
| Official Website | The Ranchers Official Website |
The Kickstarter has proven to be a complete lie. Just take a look at what was advertised on the campaign page and look at what was delivered 4 years later. It advertised 12 farmable animals - only 3 in the game, 16 crop types - 9 in the game, 6 fruit trees - none in the game! It advertised 10 catchable fish. There is no fishing feature in the game. It also advertised hunting, mines, dungeons, wild islands and shipwrecks along with monsters but that too is missing from the game.