If you've ever played a game before, there's a certain involuntary reaction that comes over you when you hear someone go to talk about a game on TV. A certain "oh God, what are they going to say now" feeling of dread. "Wife buries partner while stacking shoe boxes in Tetris inspired disaster", "Life imitates Sims: Man trapped in toilet for hours after door mysteriously vanishes", or something even more sinister about GTA, and how it'll make you kill everyone you know and love. But when Farming Simulator showed up on TV, on topical panel show Mock the Week, no less, the reaction was somewhat different. Rather than being the subject of a mocking, it seems even Ed Byrne has become enamoured with what, on the surface, seems like one the most unlikely candidates for a gaming conversion since Sim Ant Farm.
Farming Simulator has become something of sleeper hit on PC, where, despite being the subject of much mockery from the hardcore crowd, the series has nevertheless gone on to gain a surprisingly sizeable fan base of players. From farmers themselves (whose form of escapism is seemingly living a virtual version of their own life), to modders, it's probably safe to say the series' success has taken even its own developers back, with people from around the world coming together with one goal in mind - to farm their fields, and make a profit.
Needless to say, if you come to Farming Simulator expecting an adrenaline fix, you're going to be disappointed. With crops that take days of in-game time to grow, and at least initially, a pitiful three fields to manage, to say you're not exactly going to be rushed along at a breakneck speed would be a massive understatement - if you want to stand around and watch your crops grow, taking in the sights and sounds of the countryside, you can. After finding yourself dumped outside a rustic looking country house, in the middle of - you guessed it - a gigantic farm, with a small village located roughly in the middle of the map, and fields, hills, and depots spread out all around over a huge area, it's up to you to manage every aspect of your farm, as you plough the fields, sell your produce, and tend to your animals in order to turn a profit. The only problem is, it isn't initially all that clear how you do it.
We plough the fields and scatter.
Farming Simulator is something of an odd paradox, in that it has a huge, optional, and fairly expansive tutorial that takes the best part of an hour to play through, yet doesn't actually tell you everything you need to know to play the game. Rather than taking you through the stages of growing your crops as you're doing it, on your own farm, you're instead dropped in and out of a test farm in various stages of production, where you're asked to do different things - bale up hay, dig up potatoes, or simply plough the field. The only problem is, it doesn't cover anywhere near the number of options you have in the game - and if you don't already know a fair amount about farming, it'll be an uphill battle to get going.
You'll start off with three fields under your control, already ripe with crops ready to be harvested, and a selection of vehicles you'll have to use to do so. Rather than having specially dedicated machinery for each task, you'll instead have to attach various tools to your tractors in order to get the job done. While you have a giant combine harvester for harvesting your crops, your tractor can double up as a seed planter, or a lawnmower, with a range of extensions and add-ons to suit.
First things first, with a field full of crops, it's up to you to jump behind the wheel of your harvester, start the blade going, and, well, harvest it. After studiously driving up and down the field in straight lines (or going crazy and making your own crop circles if you feel like scaring the locals), your truck will eventually fill up, at which point you'll have to jump out, leg it over to your tractor, attach a trailer, and pull it up alongside so your harvester can deposit the grain, before carrying on its way. When the field's fully harvested, it's time to switch to another tractor and attach a cultivator to churn up the land again, before scuttling off to collect your sowing attachment, to reseed the field. Give it a few days of in game time, and you'll have another field of crops on your hand ready to be chopped down, rinsed, and repeated.
There really is a lot of machinery on offer.
Safe to say, it's a rather hands-on experience in Farming Simulator, as you do everything on the farm for yourself. With full control over the vehicles, you'll be the one ploughing, sowing, harvesting, and delivering your crops to the depot, ready to be sold - although that does mean you can only get one thing done at a time. Luckily, you do have the ability to hire workers to take over some of the more menial tasks for you - although it may not always go to plan. In theory, it sounds simple enough - all you have to do is park the appropriate vehicle on the relevant field and press a button to have the computer take over, freeing you up to work on another field, or attend to a more pressing matter. When you come back later to find the tractor either lying on its side, or stuck on a tree, and the berk inside still charging you by the minute, you'll start to think you should stick to doing things yourself.
Once you've reprimanded your AI co-worker and got your crops harvested, though, it's time to sell them to the highest bidder, which, in the context of Farming Simulator, means you have to drive your trailer to the selling point that's offering the most for your goods. The train station, the village, the inn, the mill, and a biofuel plant will all accept your wares - but all pay different prices. With the difference per whatever-it-is-the-game's-crop-are-measured-in sometimes being as much as $200-300, you'll want to make sure you get the best price, but while the game's handy built-in PDA has a list of the best prices, it somewhat bizarrely doesn't actually label them on your map. While your PDA may say the Inn has a special need for wheat, if you don't instantly know where the Inn is, you'll have to simply drive around until you stumble across it, as nothing on your map is actually labelled to tell you what it is, rather than what it does.
When all you end up getting is a few thousand dollars for your days of hard work, it can seem like you're spending an awful lot of time for very little in return - but such is the life of a farmer. Luckily, though, there are other ways to bring in the dollars. While everything on your farm costs money - your vehicles use petrol, which has to be refilled, the seeds you buy have to be restocked, your animals use feed, and your employees, when they're not trying to mate your tractors with the nearest tree, also draw a wage, you'll from time to time be offered the chance to complete missions for money. These missions usually require a certain vehicle (either a front loader with a pallet fork, or a tractor with a lawnmower), and see you being paid ridiculous amounts of money to complete seemingly trivial, yet oddly challenging tasks. Whether you're mowing the suddenly overgrown quarter of a golf course that's mysteriously started to resemble a jungle, or ferrying a forgetful family's luggage from the station to their hotel, you'll be earning over $5,000 for each mission you complete, which isn't an insubstantial amount of money when you're first finding your footing with the game.
Chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga.
BUt although Farming Simulator may claim to be a simulator, it doesn't stick to its real world trappings quite as much as it otherwise could do. For starters, you can speed up/slow down time, going from real time to x30 and back, depending on how busy you are, and how much of a workload you have - but it's the physics that make things a lot more fun than they really should be. If there's a mountain in between you and the field you want to get to, why bother going around? Simply drive up it, and off the cliff on the other side, where you'll simply bounce around a bit before righting yourself and carrying on. Just be careful you don't clip the curbs near the store, mind, as they'll flip your tractor in the blink of an eye. The somewhat odd physics make the missions even more challenging than the time limits. Once, when driving back with a forgetful couple's luggage, a car that bore a mysterious resemblance to a 4x4 BMW pulled out of a side road in front of us, clipping the side of our loader, which, for reasons only known to itself, sent us spinning through the air like we were made of cardboard and had been shot out of a cannon.
While it's certainly not for adrenaline hunters, Farming Simulator does fill a niche for a game that lets you simply while away the hours without any real objectives. The only real goal here is to turn a profit, expand your farm, and make it the most successful enterprise it's possible to be. While some added graphical niceness would have been appreciated (trees appearing out of nowhere doesn't make for the most immersive of environments), and a rudimentary soundtrack would have given you something to listen to while driving from A to B, it's arguably the poor tutorial that really lets this down the most. If you don't already know what you're doing when it comes to farming, there's a surprising number of stumbling blocks here, as even buying a new mower is a challenge, as you have no idea what you're supposed to attach it to. With a little bit of work helping new players find their way, this could have been much more accessible than it is. For that, perhaps we'll have to wait for Farming Simulator 2014 - the Next Gen.
Format Reviewed: Playstation 3
