I bought this game because I was bored, fancied a simulation game and this was on sale. The Sims 3 didn't work at the time, so this won. Now I've played it for over ten hours, I've made a list of the things about it that have made the game a little less than enjoyable. I may have gotten more enjoyment out of writing this list than I have playing the game.
1 - This Game Does Not Understand Tutorials
Oh suuuuuure, there are tutorials in the game. Er, I mean, accessed from the main menu. And they have nothing to do with your actual game. You complete a series of ultimately boring activities one by one. Integrate them into the game, you say? Why the hell would they want to do a thing like that?
I mean, yes, it's great that the tutorials are NOT in the main game and are therefore optional for farming simulator veterans (did I really just type that), but they could just as easily be put into the main game and made optional. Running a farm for the first time? Hey, follow this tutorial. Don't care? Hey, click this button to carry on with whatever you were doing. The tutorials don't add anything at all to your farm because they're separate, so you're just driving a tractor around for no real gain when the controls are shown on screen anyway. But when you're in your game, you're told absolutely nothing. You own field 16, by the way. It's wheat and it's ready to harvest, so that's where you start. Your harvester is the red one. You can turn the crap left all over the ground into bales if you have the right equipment (you don't, it's expensive) or you can run over it with the cultivator and it'll disappear so you can seed the field again. The grain symbols mean this, this and this. Other stuff the game doesn't mention, blah blah blah. You're welcome.
2 - This Is Your Next Purchase, By The Way
1 - This Game Does Not Understand Tutorials
Oh suuuuuure, there are tutorials in the game. Er, I mean, accessed from the main menu. And they have nothing to do with your actual game. You complete a series of ultimately boring activities one by one. Integrate them into the game, you say? Why the hell would they want to do a thing like that?
I mean, yes, it's great that the tutorials are NOT in the main game and are therefore optional for farming simulator veterans (did I really just type that), but they could just as easily be put into the main game and made optional. Running a farm for the first time? Hey, follow this tutorial. Don't care? Hey, click this button to carry on with whatever you were doing. The tutorials don't add anything at all to your farm because they're separate, so you're just driving a tractor around for no real gain when the controls are shown on screen anyway. But when you're in your game, you're told absolutely nothing. You own field 16, by the way. It's wheat and it's ready to harvest, so that's where you start. Your harvester is the red one. You can turn the crap left all over the ground into bales if you have the right equipment (you don't, it's expensive) or you can run over it with the cultivator and it'll disappear so you can seed the field again. The grain symbols mean this, this and this. Other stuff the game doesn't mention, blah blah blah. You're welcome.
2 - This Is Your Next Purchase, By The Way
Every so often, a notification comes up saying that a field is going up for auction that day. So far I've only had it happen twice. For field 15, I didn't have enough money. The field sold, and then I later bought it anyway for the price that it was before the auction. Field 19 I'm currently bidding for, because I have enough money and I really don't know why these auctions exist unless they give you a chance to buy up the land at a discount. Still, though, I didn't think that the game was going to be shoving my next potential purchase in my face. If these auctions don't exist purely for discounts, then why do they exist at all if I can still buy the field afterwards? Even if they do exist for discounts, there has to be a better way of doing that than making you panic because the only field you can almost afford is selling to another farm that doesn't exist.
3 - I Don't Have A Front Loader And A Pallet Fork
The game has little missions that you can do for extra money. 95% of these require a front loader and a pallet fork. These things are very fucking expensive. They're not something you're going to be able to afford for a while. The other missions require a lawnmower of some form, which isn't so unattainable, but these missions are few and far between. You can set how often you are offered these missions or switch them off altogether, but you can't do anything about having missions you can't afford to do thrown at you while you desperately wait for a lawnmower mission to come up, because you've just started the game and you need the money, dammit.
4 - Friendly Neighbour X, Otherwise Known As The Farming Simulator Zombie Apocalypse
There's a little village on the map, probably the shittiest village I've ever seen, where the farm shop is. There are people walking around it. They're essentially nameless drones whose sole existence is to make the village look more village-like, but as you can't interact with them, they consist of the same set of people sticking rigidly to their set paths, you can walk through them and they really don't appear to do anything, the effect is somewhat lost.
Not so the motorists, oh no. Motorists like to stand out. It's perfectly okay if you accidentally go up the curb and crush a pedestrian because they'll just walk through your vehicle without a care in their robot world, but if you happen to hit a car you're in for a proper crash. You can't drive through them. This kind of realism is all well and good, but at the same time, it really really isn't. Like the people, the cars consist of the same lot endlessly driving around on their set paths. They will not deviate from these paths, no matter what. They don't care if there's a massive tractor and trailer in the way, they'll just drive into you, and there is no real way to avoid it. If you stick to the right side of the road, you still get them pulling out and driving into your side. Even when that doesn't happen, remember you're driving farm equipment around. It's not the fastest thing you could be in. By and large, the drone cars are faster than you. So if you're in your tractor pulling your trailer along, prepare to be rear-ended by one of the locals.
Your best bet is to drive on the wrong side of the road (the left, in this case) and then just dodge them. It won't completely eliminate the possibility of you being driven into, but at least you can see when a car is coming and move out of its way.
If you can't manage to avoid a crash that results in your vehicle being stuck, don't worry, there's something to fix that that can be equally irritating.
If you can't manage to avoid a crash that results in your vehicle being stuck, don't worry, there's something to fix that that can be equally irritating.
5 - Tractor Teleportation
In the save menu, if you scroll through the pages there's one showing where all your vehicles are on the map. If they're stuck, you can click on them and reset them... but you can't choose where that reset sends them. If it's equipment that you use to farm fields in any of the corners of the map, you're in for a very long drive back from the main farm in the centre, because that's where it sends everything. There's no option to teleport your vehicles to specific places on the map to make your farming easier: you have to drive whatever it is all the way there. Then, when you need to refill the fertiliser or seeds or whatever, you have to teleport it back to the main farm, refill it, and then drive aaaaaaaall the way back again. It's almost as much fun as it sounds.
6 - Farming Simulation Of This One Map Here
I have the Titanium version, so I have two maps, but the game starts you off with only one map if you get the regular edition. A bit of variety wouldn't go amiss. It's also a set map: your farm is where it is, buildings are where they are, fields are where they are, blah blah blah. All you can do is buy what's there on the map already if you want to expand. You don't get to build anything at all.
7 - Speaking Of Maps...
You can't see it. No, really. You can view a full map of your farm twice from the save menu. One shows where all your vehicles are and the other shows the status of all your crops (growing, ready for harvest, blah blah). You cannot see the map in any way as it is, showing all the fields and all the buildings and locations etc in full. You can view it in little sections on the PDA thing but you can't see anything on that that isn't in the immediate vicinity. Don't know where the inn is, but want to sell your harvest there? Tough shit. Drive around and find it.
7 - Speaking Of Maps...
You can't see it. No, really. You can view a full map of your farm twice from the save menu. One shows where all your vehicles are and the other shows the status of all your crops (growing, ready for harvest, blah blah). You cannot see the map in any way as it is, showing all the fields and all the buildings and locations etc in full. You can view it in little sections on the PDA thing but you can't see anything on that that isn't in the immediate vicinity. Don't know where the inn is, but want to sell your harvest there? Tough shit. Drive around and find it.
8 - Old MacDonald Had Fuck All, E-I-E-I-O
You can buy chickens, sheep and cows on the game. There's one pen in the main farm area for chickens. There's one field in one of the corners of the map for cows. There's one field in another corner of the map for sheep. You can't expand or move any of the animal pens. There's about 40 crop fields you can buy.
You start the game with only the ability to keep chickens, as the equipment for dairy and wool farming is expensive. You are therefore stuck with farming crops whether you wanted to be an arable farmer or not. If you wanted to play the game as a cattle farmer, you can't. If you wanted to be a sheep farmer, you can't. If you wanted to be a pig farmer, you definitely bought the wrong game, because they don't exist at all. A bit more freedom would be nice. I haven't got any sheep or cows yet, but a cow is a cow and a sheep is a sheep and a chicken is a chicken. There are no breeds or anything like that. I'm told you can breed cattle, but when they're all the damn same I don't really see why. I'm pretty sure that if I get to the stage where I can afford the machinery to have cows in my game, I'm not going to need to care as much about saving money by breeding instead of buying.
9 - Run, MacDonald, Run
Nowhere in the game is meat farming possible. Chickens = eggs, sheep = wool, cows = milk. I can only assume that that's why pigs don't exist.
The chicken pen is a little patch of grass with a couple of coups in it and a cockerel whose purpose in the game utterly baffles me. The chickens just wander around the pen. Only a few of them show up in the pen, but apparently you can buy as many as you like and they'll all contribute to egg production. Do you collect eggs from the chicken coups? No, of course you don't. Eggs are laid randomly all over the pen. You have to run around and pick them up individually, and, to add to the egg hunt fun, the perimeter of the pen is mostly shrubbery, which eggs like to hide in. If farming sheep or cows is as irritating as this then I'll stick to my fields, thanks.
10 - Retro Sound, Graphics and Other Irritations
The graphics are terrible. Pixel trees. Generally awful textures. The sky looks the same every day. Yes you get sunsets, but it's the same sunset. Then there's the zombie apocalypse of emotionless and silent drones in the village, and weather exists only to stop you from harvesting - in rain or hail you can't harvest crops. There are no seasons (ON A FARMING SIMULATOR, REALLY!?) or other kinds of weather.
The sounds are not much better. Chickens apparently only make one noise, over and over, and I can hear it whenever I'm in the main farmyard. I'll have to assume that sheep and cows are on the same level. The rest of the sound is cars on the street and the noise from your tractors with the occasional birdsong, but after a while it all just blends into dull. True to the game's fuck-tutorials attitude, there's nothing that says how much it costs to hire workers, so I've never bothered, but since the character you're stuck with otherwise doesn't make a sound, it's safe to say that the farm workers won't either. God forbid anyone in a simulation game behave like an actual human instead of a robot. There's a farmhouse with laundry out to dry and other "real" things on your map, but it serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever, so, like the village, it's just there to make things seem more realistic. When it doesn't have a use and the graphics are crap, the effect doesn't really work.
In all, this is a Farming Simulator for robots. If robots had farms, it'd feel like this. It's okay for passing time with and sometimes it's almost fun, but I wouldn't say I found it addictive and I doubt I'll see it through when I have so many games that are so much better on that list (and The Sims 3 is now working). It hasn't reviewed very well, and I'd say it deserves it. There are so many obvious improvements that could be there and aren't. It's worth a sale price but I'd never pay full price for it. I may go back to it, I may not. Field 19 could well end up being in limbo forever.
10 - Retro Sound, Graphics and Other Irritations
The graphics are terrible. Pixel trees. Generally awful textures. The sky looks the same every day. Yes you get sunsets, but it's the same sunset. Then there's the zombie apocalypse of emotionless and silent drones in the village, and weather exists only to stop you from harvesting - in rain or hail you can't harvest crops. There are no seasons (ON A FARMING SIMULATOR, REALLY!?) or other kinds of weather.
The sounds are not much better. Chickens apparently only make one noise, over and over, and I can hear it whenever I'm in the main farmyard. I'll have to assume that sheep and cows are on the same level. The rest of the sound is cars on the street and the noise from your tractors with the occasional birdsong, but after a while it all just blends into dull. True to the game's fuck-tutorials attitude, there's nothing that says how much it costs to hire workers, so I've never bothered, but since the character you're stuck with otherwise doesn't make a sound, it's safe to say that the farm workers won't either. God forbid anyone in a simulation game behave like an actual human instead of a robot. There's a farmhouse with laundry out to dry and other "real" things on your map, but it serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever, so, like the village, it's just there to make things seem more realistic. When it doesn't have a use and the graphics are crap, the effect doesn't really work.
In all, this is a Farming Simulator for robots. If robots had farms, it'd feel like this. It's okay for passing time with and sometimes it's almost fun, but I wouldn't say I found it addictive and I doubt I'll see it through when I have so many games that are so much better on that list (and The Sims 3 is now working). It hasn't reviewed very well, and I'd say it deserves it. There are so many obvious improvements that could be there and aren't. It's worth a sale price but I'd never pay full price for it. I may go back to it, I may not. Field 19 could well end up being in limbo forever.
