Lawn Mowing Simulator 2

Skyhook Games’ original Lawn Mowing Simulator built a surprisingly devoted following — some players logged well over a hundred hours, a few reportedly past a thousand, turning a chore into one of the more beloved “job sim” games on Steam. Lawn Mowing Simulator 2, out September 23 on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, moves the setting to the USA and rebuilds several of its core systems. On paper, it’s a real expansion. In practice, the first week of reviews tell two different stories depending on who you ask.

What’s genuinely new and good

The content is there. Eleven locations at launch already beats what the original shipped with, spanning suburban lawns, commercial properties, and municipal contracts, most offering multiple jobs of varying size. The grass system was rebuilt entirely from the ground up, and it shows in the moment-to-moment satisfaction of the core loop — the difference between cut and uncut grass is sharper, flowers and weeds are now part of a lawn’s actual makeup, and watching clippings fly out the side of a mower reads as genuinely more tactile than before. Leaf blowing, a long-requested feature, finally arrives as a core mechanic capable of rendering tens of thousands of leaves at once, paired with licensed equipment from Kubota, SCAG, and STIGA. A new wear-and-tear system means running equipment too hard or clipping a fence has real consequences, and returning customers’ properties now evolve between visits instead of resetting to an identical state every time.

The launch was rough

Here’s where the picture turns. Performance complaints are consistent and specific across sources: screen tearing and frame drops reported even on PS5 Pro, Steam reviewers describing the game as buggy and poorly optimized at launch, missing basics like an FOV slider, and more than one player saying the whole thing “feels like early access.” Steam’s own aggregate score backs this up directly — reviews landed at Mixed, sitting in the low-to-mid 40s percent positive in the days following release, a steep drop from the goodwill the original earned.

A sequel some longtime fans say took a step back

Beyond the technical issues, a specific and recurring complaint from players of the first game is that the business-management side has actually gotten shallower, not deeper — employee training, present in the original, is reportedly gone entirely, leaving long-term hires performing well below expectations with no way to improve them. There’s also a genuinely strange design choice multiple reviewers landed on independently: the residential leaf-blowing task has you clearing debris off paths and driveways by blowing it onto the lawn you just finished mowing, rather than collecting and removing it — the kind of friction that undercuts the exact satisfaction loop the game is selling.

A genuinely split critical picture

Worth stating plainly: this isn’t a case of universal agreement. At least one outlet scored it 8/10, praising the expanded content and calling it a smarter, bigger follow-up; another called it a disappointment and “a devolution” of what made the original work. Steam’s player base has landed closer to the second camp, and the specificity and consistency of the performance complaints — the same screen-tearing and optimization issues showing up independently across PC and console coverage — suggests this is a genuine day-one technical problem rather than just preference or nostalgia talking.

Verdict

The ideas in Lawn Mowing Simulator 2 are sound, and there’s a real, more content-rich sequel in here — new country, better grass, long-awaited leaf blowing, evolving gardens for the series’ most loyal players. But it launched in a state rough enough that both Steam’s own numbers and independent coverage agree something isn’t right yet, and a few systems longtime fans valued seem to have gone backward rather than forward. Worth it for patient genre fans once a patch or two lands; everyone else should wait and watch how Skyhook responds.