Mad Farm VR

I want to be honest with you the way a friend at a used game stall would be: Mad Farm VR is not trying to be Arizona Sunshine. It is a small, quirky, VR-only wave survival game built by a tiny outfit called Happy Bat, and it wears its rough edges without apology. You stand your ground as a beleaguered farmer while hordes of zombie animals charge you down, and the whole thing has the handmade energy of someone who really, genuinely thought zombie chickens were funny enough to build a game around. They were not entirely wrong. The core of it is wave defense built around physical weapons. You have five tools at your disposal: a sling, a bow with three arrow variants, a chainsaw, explosive bait, and an axe. The developer openly calls the physics "ridiculously stupid" and realistic in the same breath, and that is actually a fair description. Swinging the axe or nocking an arrow has a tactile sloppiness that is either charming or frustrating depending on your tolerance for lo-fi VR jank. The bow in particular rewards practice, and the Training mode exists specifically so you can get your eye in before the horde arrives. Environments span a farm setting and a forest area, which is a modest scope but at least gives the two locations a different visual feel. There are three modes to work through. Story mode runs across three episodes and caps with a boss fight, which is a more substantial structure than you might expect from something this scrappy. Arcade mode strips away the narrative and asks you to chase a high score against endless waves, while a post-launch Tower Defence update added a third option where you teleport between positions to protect the farmer's wife from enemies arriving on multiple paths. That Tower Defence mode also brought a double-barrel shotgun into the arsenal, which is a welcome addition. The developer shipped a free demo containing the Training mode, which is a genuinely good-faith gesture for something this niche, letting you test the physics and weapon feel before committing. The honest limitations are real and worth naming. The community around this game is nearly silent, Steam reviews sit at just a handful, and the production values are clearly those of a micro-budget indie from 2018. There is no multiplayer, no progression system, and the content ceiling is low. If you are coming to VR zombie games from a polished title, this will feel sparse. But if you have a headset, a spare hour, and a soft spot for games that know exactly what they are, the physical weapon handling has a certain grip to it that more expensive games occasionally forget to include. Mad Farm VR occupies the same shelf as the eccentric one-person Steam curios I keep coming back to: not technically accomplished, but specific in a way that larger titles are not. Zombie chickens suiciding into your face while you fumble an axe swing in real space is a kind of absurdist fun that the medium does well. Approach it as a brief, silly physics sandbox with a light story wrapper and a genuine Tower Defence mode hiding underneath, and it delivers that experience with reasonable honesty.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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