January. Hell month. My highly effective mind – often a throbbing, high-performance organ able to doing a number of sums per minute – has atrophied to a moist walnut, a sodden gray scrap of cauterised flesh that ricochets round inside my cranium like a horrible slug. The excesses of the vacation season have left my wretched physique brittle and hole. My eyes are sunken into my cadaverous face, like any individual launched two unhealthy grapes as laborious as they may at some raw bread. There is just one reprieve from this cursed month, and that’s to turn into a lumberjack. Don’t attempt to cease me.
Lumberjack Simulator joins Farming Simulator and Woodcutting Simulator within the more and more crowded lumberjack simulation market and is, indubitably, one of many three lumberjack simulators I’ve ever performed. This is an easy game during which you, apparently the one human being left alive on the planet, are doomed to traverse a brown terrain mesh looking for man’s tallest and most historical picket foe: the tree. Once one is situated (they have a tendency to maneuver in herds) you need to assault it with the lumberjacking implements at your disposal till the trunk is compromised, sending this moisture-wicking arboreal freak from the conceited vertical to the shameful horizontal in a single humbling Pythagorean arc.
Of course, making gentle leisure of felling 1000’s of harmless bushes is perverse within the context of all the true world deforestation we’re presently dealing with. Vast swathes of the Amazon are being razed to the bottom every minute to fulfill the spiralling demand for chopping boards and hamster bedding, but right here Lumberjack Simulator normalises the unfettered environmental destruction required to feed the insatiable capitalist machine that, like some demented Bertha*, vomits money for billionaires and turns the sky into poison.
Not solely that, however the loading screens show a weird sequence of pithy truisms about lumberjacks too. Things like “lumberjacks are respectful of themselves and others”, “lumberjacks give away a portion of their wealth to the less fortunate”, “lumberjacks try to solve problems before asking for help” and my private favorite, as a result of it hints at some untold backstory between this game’s writer and a lumberjack, “lumberjacks are loyal”. This breathless venerating of the occupation is nothing wanting revisionist, pro-lumberjack propaganda, a brazen try and whitewash the function lumberjacks have performed within the unsustainable harvesting of bushes for his or her valuable tree flesh.
But let’s be pragmatic, that is Lumberjack Simulator and lashing your self to the bushes in protest simply isn’t an choice, so off you go to work. Before you possibly can jack any lumber you need to navigate to a delegated logging space demarcated by a glowing inexperienced rectangle, first traversing muddy terrain which deforms realistically beneath your chosen automobile’s chunky tyres. Your tree snatching tractor sinks believably into the comfortable earth, forsaking deep furrows because it churns up the moist brown grime. Your truck has to change between gear modes to maintain traction, lest it splodge to a sloppy halt, rim-deep in nature’s personal sodden gunk.
Don’t get too excited. Lumberjack Simulator doesn’t come near the dizzying type of mud physics seen within the present class chief in actual time slurry deformation, Mudrunner (née Spintires). Your tyre tracks don’t mix with each other over repeated journeys to type impassable ditches to be circumnavigated afterward. There are not any rivers to forge, tyres to deflate or suspensions to tweak. Mud will keep on with the wheels and chassis, however the autos don’t maintain any harm, gained’t sink very deep and can jerk about like dying fish with each sudden motion of the steering wheel. Mudrunner’s mud is harmful and wild, an unpredictable stew of soil and rock. This mud is extra just like the marmalade puddles within the breakfast desk stage of Micro Machines: ineffective and predictable, slowing you down uniformly.
These comparatively rudimentary physics additionally wreak havoc while you get right down to the sorry enterprise of lumberjacking. You’ve obtained half a dozen totally different means of truly chopping down a tree. Depending on its dimension you possibly can have it at together with your hand axe or chainsaw till it topples over, after which you’ll drag it in regards to the forest, manhandling it into the again of your pick-up truck together with your invisible ghost palms in full view of all of its mates.
You’ve additionally obtained a sequence of specialized lumberjacking vans and tractors, every with its personal medieaval torture gadget bolted to the entrance. These guys can latch on to felled tree trunks like they’re fairground grabber prizes, or grasp them inside their bear trap-like claws whereas they concurrently buzzsaw by the tree’s base, like some large QVC kitchen utensil. You can prune off awkward branches as soon as a tree is down, prepared for loading into the game’s off-road hauler, earlier than you ferry your picket prize again to base to be bought. With the money you should purchase upgrades to your autos, to go again out and repeat the method till you’re glad, although these enhancements don’t do an entire proper now.
There is an IKEA bookshelf-thin veneer of a severe simulation right here, however Lumberjack Simulator is scuppered by wonky, floaty physics and – a much more severe concern for a lumberjack simulator – an unrealistic depiction of what forests really seem like. Maybe it’s to supply a small sense of jeopardy when hauling logs throughout the muddy terrain that there’s no choice to correctly safe your load both, which appears to straight contradict the characterisation of lumberjacks within the loading display messages.
Far from the altruistic, self-caring problem-solvers the developer assures us that they’re, Lumberjack Simulator depicts lumberjacks of their purest sense: socially outcast risk-seekers with little regard for office security regulation, subconsciously eager for the day they’re lastly pulverised by an unsecured log.
*Bertha is a British youngsters’s tv programme from the 1980s a couple of possessed manufacturing facility machine and the unlucky women and men condemned to work together with her.
