Up until this point, my experience with the Lawn Mowing Simulator Series has been vicarious through a friend who would never shut up about it. This isn’t necessarily a fair presentation of the game because that friend in question was a landscaper, so the game and his life matched up fairly well. Weird to think we would eventually find a day and age where our favorite game that we play to relax after a long day of work is literally the thing we need to relax from. Who am I to judge, though? I do the same all the time. Me and lawncare have a tumultuous relationship at best, but Lawn Mowing Simulator 2 seemed like a good chance to correct that.
As far as sims are concerned, Lawn Mowing Simulator 2 is a pretty easy game to get started in. You have a series of tutorials teaching you the multiple tools, but overall there isn’t much to it. I recently played Train Sim World 7 for another review, so maybe my baseline is all kinds of messed up. In about 6 hours, I still wasn’t complete with learning my many, many trains. In contrast to that, 20 minutes of mowing grass at the office and you are ready to start your company.
It is actually refreshing to be able to start playing the sim in quick order, rather than feeling like the fun part is hours away. There is some complexity to the mechanics as well. On a base level, there are a few options for all tools, such as my preferred lawn mower with a front blade panel that can be raised and lowered. You get the technical nuance of a mower, which a purist is sure to love, but for the layman, there is nothing too complex here that you can’t figure out if you want to.
What the game doesn’t teach you, or, moreover, waste the time to teach you, are the little intricacies of the job. Once I got started, I realized how the mower drives over grass. You can get an organized design because the grass reacts properly to all the outside forces. This doesn’t affect your scores or profits in any way, but if you are taking this seriously, you get this additional standard to hold your job to. You might also want to learn all the details of polishing the job near the end. I was more than happy to phone it in once my metrics were hit, but you might actually take pride in your work. This town would hate my mother with her high standards.
There was a point when I wanted to be a perfectionist, though. I like to go the distance when playing Simulators. Lawn Mowing Simulator 2 can make the process incredibly frustrating. The nature of the beast is that you are dealing with cleaning and clearing spaces, and you can easily miss the tiniest of locations. Then you finish the brunt of it and go looking for where and what you actually missed, which is where the problem lies. You get this Hitman sense, the ability to see patches of grass you missed, maybe leaves, an object in hiding. These spots, even in this mode, can be crazy hard to spot, searching for a blue shimmer in a sea of grey. You can legitimately be searching for a long while.
There were also some things I wasn’t expecting the game to be so lenient on. On the one hand, I liked this, given that ultimately what I wanted out of the game was to unwind, which was achieved. Driving around on a riding mower (which I have always wanted to do) was pretty chilling, mixed in with the tranquil lo-fi beats that played in the background. The mower moves rather slowly, and while going too fast eats at the blades, it’s never so much that I can’t always dictate my pace and get away with it.
That’s all getting a little sidetracked. Each job usually gives you a few set jobs to complete, like blowing leaves. Early on in Lawn Mowing Simulator 2, a lot of these tasks are just to clear them off of paths like a stone walkway or a driveway. This means you can get away with completing this goal by blowing these right onto the lawn without any punishment, even in job ratings. I have far more respect for my clients than to do this, though, so I did the right thing. I blew all the leaves onto the neighbors’ lawn.
The player’s movement is a little stiff, so blowing leaves can be one of the more frustrating tasks in general. The bigger thing is that there are a lot of things that can get in your way, like shrubbery, that the game doesn’t really have a good answer for. Raking is the tool to use to get things away from walls they are stuck to, but to actually move it to a location you have more access to can be a process in general. Then blowing the leaves in general can be frustrating. Obviously, these leaves will move in all directions, not just straight ahead, but moving the character to keep some control over this process can be daunting, prolonging the experience.
This is compounded by the fact that the physics can be wonky on top of that. I love that Lawn Mowing Simulator 2 gives you an in-game button to reset your items back to the truck. The issue is that I had to use it a lot. Lawn Mowers get stuck on windowsill flower beds all the time, and I will not even bore you with the way I got my trimmer stuck on a birdbath. The player model did the same thing as well, spazzing into a bush I walked into wrong. All have easy fixes to the outcome, just not the annoyance of dealing with them.
This can become more noticeable in other jobs, like one that was just clearing leaves from under a water tower. The process was the most time-consuming of the tasks, taking me around an hour in total to complete. Where this becomes frustrating is that objects like generators become painful barriers to progression. Worse, half of what needs cleaning surrounds the player’s truck, which acts as the starting point for each job and has a trailer bed for your tools. You can’t move it at all for most of the job; it blocks large chunks of the debris and feels poorly placed, which doesn’t happen often, but it can.
There is some fun to be had in building your business, though I do think it’s a shame there isn’t more to it. You get a warehouse to run your growing business from. The best part of this, though, is admittedly lost on me: you have a large selection of licensed equipment to unlock, though the prices are pretty high. This could be accurate; again, not my forte, but to start, you are making maybe a hundred or two per job, with almost everything starting near $1,000, and that’s for blowers and weedwackers.
That isn’t bad, but true growth begins when you hire staff so you can send them on jobs while you do yours. They have ranks, which essentially govern how much they will actually do on any given job. So, ultimately, they are worse than I am, and I am pretty bad. What the actual issue is is that you get contracts with the usual places, unlocking more as your reputation grows, but staff literally work in the background while you’re working a job. This left me unable to even use my employee till several weeks after hiring them because I needed an additional mower for them to be of any use.
The thing is, you upgrade your reputation more, which mostly increases the catalogue of things you can buy to increase your empire. You even expand more. I just wish there was more customization, maybe individual upgrades. Some Sims offer that, some don’t, but I love a base I can really make my own. With reputation upgrades, you really don’t notice the effects right away since you typically have to work much more to take advantage of what they offer. At certain points, the same three houses popped up as jobs over and over again. You have way more jobs, and I would guess this feels like a growing business, but it leads to a sense of stagnation.
Verdict
I’m not really sure what I was expecting or hoping for in Lawn Mowing Simulator 2, if I am being honest. Was I looking for something to take my mind off of life? If so, yeah, the game works for that. Jump in, power up my mower, and trim some grass to 3.50″. It is an easy sim to jump into, with a lot to learn that doesn’t feel punishing in the long run. If you are not familiar with the subject of the game, you can pick this up, get in, and get started without much to hold you back. Some tasks can be frustrating and time-consuming, so buckle in. I do think the best aspects of the experience outweigh anything else, though, so this is a business worth building.
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Reviewed on PC via Steam, also available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S
*A Review Key Was provided for this review from Skyhook Game
Developer/Publisher: Skyhook Games
Release Date: September 23, 2026
Pros
+Simple tutorial that quickly gets you to the main game.
+Fairly forgiving tasks make getting started easy
+Really licensed tools and mowers that are accurately represented in how you control them.
+Some Missions offer relaxing fun.
Cons
-Character controls can make a few tasks more complex than needed.
-Game offers slow growth for your business, often feeling unbalanced.
-Item reset is good, getting stuck as often as I did was not.
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