Lawn Mowing Simulator (Xbox Series X)
When it comes to games in the vehicle simulator genre, you often find yourself behind the wheel of something you might not otherwise ever get to experience. Piloting a plane or driving a long haul truck cross country both are the kinds of real life commitments that are out of reach for those who aren’t willing to make a profession out of it, but Lawn Mowing Simulator stands out as a bit of an oddity since hopping aboard a riding mower is somewhat expensive but certainly not out of reach. Some people certainly won’t have a yard they could use such a thing in though, but a further consideration is the fact that even if you do have a spacious lawn to mow, it’s a task you can only do once the grass has grown in enough. Lawn Mowing Simulator not only provides a relaxing task to those who have no grass to cut but also gives players a year round way to sit back and engage in the simple task of trimming a massive yard, all without having to worry about the little errors since that won’t be your home’s yard marked by your mistakes.
There’s a pretty simple core loop at the heart of Lawn Mowing Simulator, the main gameplay literally just about taking a riding mower out into a yard to trim some overgrown grass down to size. A mowing session does start with a moment where you need to head out into the yard and make sure the grounds are free of any objects hiding in the grass, things like sticks, toys, and lawn gnomes important to pick up to avoid mower damage. This task is, unfortunately, rather basic and can even sap some interest in heading to a new yard to do your work. Running around the yard to find something that can likely be quite well hidden in the tall grass does feel like a bit of a chore, and while some might already say Lawn Mowing Simulator is about providing a virtual version of a real life chore, there’s little going on in picking up litter to clear the yard and it can easily boil down to sprinting around the yard in a first person view waiting for a pick up prompt to appear for a well hidden object. However, when you do head to a new yard type it does give you some time to get to know the area you’re in, and since there are very few purely square yards to mow you are given a moment to notice the contours of the yard’s edges or note large objects you’ll have to carefully work around. In the game’s Career mode though there are contracts focused entirely on picking up litter and you get paid very little for doing them, the task bland and mostly just a good way to skip a day of lawn-mowing work if you don’t like the look of other contracts.
When it is time to cut some grass though, the player hops aboard one of a selection of motorized riding lawn mowers, the game reproducing a good set of diverse mowers that do feel appreciably different. Some will require wider turns or can pivot in place, others might be wider so they can do more but can’t reach tight spaces, and little considerations like driving speed can make the more expensive mowers worth investing in. Mowers have different features as well like how they dispense with grass clippings, some spraying it out the side while others store them for dumping either during the mow or afterwards, and by buying attachments you can even alter the capabilities of a mower or offset the extra work something like a grass discharge would add to a cheap ride.
Once you set the right trimming height and head out onto the grass, the gameplay will mostly boil down to mowing in a fairly accurate facsimile to the real job. Viewed now in third person, you go back and forth over grass to cut it down to size and to fully complete a lawn you will usually need to cut 99.5% or 99.9% of all the grass. This does mean, with standard mowers, a job will usually take around half an hour with the work time varying based on the size of the area you’re mowing, but once you do start getting better mowers you can slash that time in half. The gradual work of clearing away the grass is a meditative and low commitment task that makes it easy to pop onto Lawn Mowing Simulator for a simple low pressure session, the suggested time present in the Career even just more about getting extras for doing the job quickly rather than a limit on how long you can play. Free Mow has even lower pressure on the player if they really do want to just relax and watch the visible progress of an overgrown lawn gradually getting more tidy over time thanks to their involvement, but it’s not going to provide anything unique or exciting for those who might want more of a twist out of video game lawn mowing.
There are a lot of little considerations while mowing that add some texture to the experience still. If you turn too sharply you can damage the dirt and receive a fine. Colliding your mower will also lead to a tiny fine but one best avoided if possible, and your mower will start to wear down if you push it too hard, missing grass as well as receiving minor damage you’ll need to repair when back in the garage. The most notable concern while mowing though are yards with plants you aren’t meant to cut, flowers often forcing the driver to apply a gentler touch when trimming the boundaries of a large lawn. Again, the penalty for hitting a flower is easy enough to stomach in small measures so you’ll never really be tempted to restart a contract because of such small errors, although there is one odd element that can lead to things going awry. If you pause while driving and resume, sometimes your mower might be launched up into the air, although the few times I saw it happen it never caused anything too drastic to recover from. Still, it did have the potential to really go awry if the mower had landed wrong so one should be careful about coming to a stop before pausing.
Once a lawn is nearly done and the big mower would struggle to get into tight spaces though, it’s time to get off and get out the string trimmer. This handheld cutter can’t cut the wide swathes of yard as quickly as the riding mowers, but if you want to be delicate around flowers or reach spaces your mower can’t go, it gives you the means to clean up and earn those tiny percentages that might have seemed daunting while riding on the less precise mower. In some yards the trimmer will get a lot more use, a few even themed heavily around its use due to cramped yard features like ample bushes. Trying to carve away too much of the grass with the trimmer will lead to a mess of clippings though and it is a much slower option than a vehicle so it’s not a true substitute, but it does add a nice way to top off your work and the sound of it carving through those lasts bits of grass is particularly satisfying.
The different lawns of Lawn Mowing Simulator provide a decent albeit fairly thin amount of variety. When you are starting off it’s easy to find novel yards to mow, the British setting providing lovely cottages with ornate gardens to mow alongside. In the Career mode as you gain more reputation for doing jobs well new lawns will appear, the player’s options graduating from small back yards to rich residences and soon unique locations like a horse training school and fruit orchards. Inevitably though you will need to head back to familiar yards to keep earning money and growing your reputation and sometimes the available contracts really won’t offer much diversity in your options. While Lawn Mowing Simulator’s point is basically to enjoy the simplicity of a task that doesn’t demand much of you, heading to the same house too many times in a row for lack of good options does wear thin some of that appeal.
Luckily there is more to Career Mode than just you driving out on a mower every in-game day. Career Mode has you running your own custom lawn mowing business and with that eventually comes options like hiring employees you can send out to do missions you don’t want to do yourself. Employees can be trained, your headquarters can be upgraded, and you can buy new equipment to help with the job. The business management element isn’t too deep and even the cost of employees is small since they’ll often quickly earn their week’s wages on a decent contract, but they do speed up the process of finding work with new conditions, the game even eventually introducing striping contracts where you need to more carefully drive up and down yards to create a special visual effect with the cut grass. Loans can be taken out as well and are great for speeding up the growth of your company, although the high amounts require good reputation to grab so you can’t dive in the deep end too quickly. Even the repayments are pretty generous as Lawn Mowing Simulator continues to err towards not trying to upset the player with demanding play or high stakes, but there is a mode with a bit more oomph you can access from the title screen.
Challenges are unlocked as your company in Career mode grows, these actually having strict conditions the player must meet to succeed. The player will need to do things like trim a lawn with a limited amount of fuel or do it in a specific amount of time, but the challenges aren’t particularly creative as they are mostly just the same few challenge types but a little stricter or on a new lawn or with a different mower. Free Mode on the other hand completely removes all pressures as you can just hop aboard any lawn or mower you’ve unlocked and mow a place free from concerns, this certainly playing more into the more zen-like appeal of doing a mildly satisfying job than other areas of the game. Career provides a good amount of structure to things though while Challenge mode is perhaps a little unambitious and not that great to engage with since it can’t straddle the line of true progress and relaxation. Lawn Mowing Simulator has had a few free updates since its initial release with new mowers, lawns, and even mechanics layered atop it even after the game released DLC so it has been gradually refined somewhat compared to its weak PC launch state. It would take a huge overhaul to make it more than what it is though, but as a simulator it does capture many of the realities of lawn work you might want while trimming away some of the worse parts, the mostly mundane task of mowing lawns presented in an acceptable way.
THE VERDICT: Lawn Mowing Simulator isn’t going to draw in players who don’t find the premise promised by the simple name appealing, but it does straddle a good line between providing the relaxing work of trimming a yard without getting bogged down in too many of the details. Career Mode gives it a decent low pressure structure with light business management and mowing lawns has a little more texture to it than riding your mower thanks to the string trimmer and different yard types. Challenge mode is a bit bland though, as is the pick up phase for every contract job despite its potential scouting importance, and the amount of yards does feel a little thin even after updates added more in. The easy enjoyment of watching your work gradually unfold does open up the chance for simple pleasures with only a few expected wrinkles to avoid it being stressful, but you really are just imitating the real life work of mowing lawns so no creative shake ups are present to elevate Lawn Mowing Simulator any further.
And so, I give Lawn Mowing Simulator for the Xbox Series X…
An OKAY rating. Despite what sounds like a rough PC launch, the Series X version of Lawn Mowing Simulator looks like it provides exactly what it wants to and it isn’t bad for it. Picking up litter does stand out as a bit boring in a game that is already slow paced though, mostly because some objects are simply too well-hidden in the grass and the task is too shallow for the attention it needs. When you’re on the mower you’re still thinking about how to drive, being careful where you need to be, and thinking about where you’ll use your trimmer after the bulk of the job is done. Mowing lawns makes for decent idle play while you do something like listen to a podcast or it’s a fine way to kill some time when you want to play a game but don’t want to make a big commitment, and Career Mode offers the chance for you to build towards something with that simple but low stakes work. It is a bit satisfying to get a big enough company you can send multiple employees off to high paying work on quality riding mowers even if the amount of content might make that process a little slower and more tedious than it could have been, but there’s still enough to the basics of Lawn Mowing Simulator that it provides relaxing work with easily visualized progress and little punishment for the mistakes you make along the way.
Lawn Mowing Simulator may not provide the unique or special vehicle driving experiences of other simulators, but it delivers on the promise of its name fairly well and provides enough to chew on that players can find a bit more to do than the basics of yard mowing. Something even more involved, expansive, or more willing to embrace gimmicks might be a more substantial experience, but Lawn Mowing Simulator knows what it wants to be and provides a game that works as a low commitment relaxing facsimile of some fairly satisfying real life work.