Simulator style games have been on the rise with the PC market, and one of the more famous games in the simulator genre is the Farming Simulator series. What started out as funny YouTube videos has quickly turned into a cult classic, with hundreds of thousands of gamers turning into farmers every year. This was my first time jumping into the series, and like real farming, you will need to put in a lot of hours to get something good out of this game.
When booting into Farming Simulaor 15, you select between two farms to begin your agricultural dominance. One of the farms is set in the United States, while the other is in a Scandinavian city, both of them fictional settings. There is no difference between selecting the farm in the United States or Scandinavia, just whichever one you prefer.
The game starts you off with some money, some farming equipment, and a few fields to begin farming. There are three basic steps in farming: plowing the field, planting seeds, and harvesting. As you acquire new equipment, you can also water your fields after planting seeds to yield a higher crop, or use fertilizer for the same outcome.
When starting out, there is something therapeutic about farming. It is quiet (there is no background music in game), and you get to just mosey along while going about your daily tasks. After a while it becomes kind of tedious. Thankfully, the game allows you hire workers to handle the basics of a farm. You’ll still have to deliver your harvested goods to silos and shipping depots, but it is nice to have the computer plowing or harvesting while you have to drive across town to drop off some wheat.
It took a while to get things going, so I went into the options menu and changed the passage of time to 60x and crop growing to fast. This did speed up some processes, but even after those changes, Farming Simulator 15 is a slow game. After seven hours of playtime, I still had not made significant progress to advance my farm in terms of buying new fields or purchasing better equipment.
The game does have random missions that you can complete, but since they are random, you may take some missions that you do not have the correct equipment to complete. For example, one of the first missions I accepted was to move a pallet of goods across town. This would be easy, I thought. I just need to purchase a pallet jack, and boom, missions complete. I purchase the pallet jack, only to find that I couldn’t attach it to any of the tractors I owned. I learned later that the more expensive tractors allow you to attach front loaders. This made me drain my bank account. It would be nice if the missions had some structure to them, or if the parts catalog was more detailed to tell you what parts are compatible with what. In the description for the pallet jack, it just says that it can be attached to tractors.
Farming Simulator 15 seems random on what it tries to explain. There are a handful of tutorials in the game to master the basics, and then there is a “help line” that you can call using a pay phone in game. But some of the help menus are very scarce, and do not help out much. I think the game could benefit from more information about the game, especially for newer players like myself.
In the game, you have access to grow many crops, like wheat, barley, soy, potatoes, and more. You can also raise livestock, sell chicken eggs, and buy equipment to start cutting down trees to sell. I haven’t been able to reach it to the forestry part, as the equipment is super expensive. There are ATMs in the world where you can get loans from the bank, but it seems like it could break the experience. Then again, maybe that would help with players like myself who find the game too slow.
I have to say that graphically I was pleasantly surprised for a game about farming. The lighting is pretty good, the equipment is very detailed, and when you’re working on your crops, it feels real and not static. For Farming Simulator 15, the team did say that they improved the physics in the game from years past, but they do seem a little wonky still. As mentioned before, there is no music playing in the background during gameplay, so you get to hear the sounds of nature and your equipment, which sound realistic.
I was also rather impressed with the multiplayer in the game, which is where I think you can get the most work done on your farm. If you want to host a game, you just select one of the farms you’ve been working on, and you friends can just hop right in and start helping out. It was seamless, and I had a lot of fun farming with a friend.
As that friend said, Farming Simulator 15 is better than it should be. There are some redeeming qualities to the game. I was a little put off by the slow gameplay and progression. But those with the patience of a real farmer will be able to get more out of this game than I can.
Score: 8/10
Farming Simulator 15 was developed by Giants Software and published by FOcus Home Interactive for PC and Mac October 30th. A retail copy of the PC version was provided to us by Focus Home Interactive for reviewing purposes.
