Farming simulator xbox 360 review full#
Farming simulator xbox 360 review Pc#

That's like having a flight simulator with no airports You just buy generic seed, and then decide what you want it to be once you're ready to sow. You don't buy a particular seed, for example. Each offers a slightly different price, but since none of the map markers tell you which station is which, there's no reason to chug slowly across the map to find the best price when you can get an adequate deal from the one around the corner. There are numerous points around the map where you can offload your harvests. Nor does the game's economy come close to even approximating the financial side of building an agricultural business. The vehicles handle slightly differently, but control is so simplistic that it really does feel like you're playing with Tonka toys rather than the real thing. Anywhere that the game might earn its 'simultator' title, it doesn't bother to make an effort. That's as deep as the fantasy goes, however. You can drive them through fields of unripe crops, blades threshing away, and they magically won't touch them. That's hardly the worst fantasy a game can indulge. It gives the game an odd toy-town feel that fits nicely with the essentially childish notion of what it means to be a farmer: brumming a tractor up and down and operating big machines that make cool clanky noises. Yet this plasticky stiffness ultimately isn't that damaging. In the town, rigid cars toil endlessly and pointlessly along, bouncing off your tractor or driving straight through you. When that calamity comes, the plough simply falls off and must be reattached.

Farming simulator xbox 360 review full#

The game world is utterly stiff and lifeless, and ruled by bizarre physics that allow a fully laden wagon full of grain to be driven head-first down a cliff without spilling (the grain is a flat texture painted inside the wagon), while driving over 10mph with a plough results in stark warnings of calamity.

It's genuinely different, and there's an attractive perversity in its slide over to the Xbox and PlayStation. There are around 100 farm vehicles to buy, and for the first hour or so there's something charming about consoles more used to bloody slaughter and frantic action being used to let you pootle up and down while looped birdsong plays and a rudimentary sunrise turns the world a bucolic orange. To begin with, Farming Simulator seems like it might hit the spot. The joy comes from the immersion - the minutiae of a very specific task, recreated as closely as possible. A certain level of monotony comes with the simulator territory, at least when viewed from the outside. You can hire workers to complete tasks for you, but all this really does is put a vehicle on auto-pilot until it finishes what it's doing. You plough the field this way, you sow the seeds this way, you harvest the crop by doing the same thing, and then you cultivate the soil back into a sowable state by driving up and down once more. Gameplay consists largely of driving slowly up and down in straight lines. One is set in what sounds like Germany but could well be a generic theme park version of any rustic European backwater town, while the other - added for the console edition - is a rootin' tootin' American map.

There are two maps on which to simulate your farming. Farming Simulator's cut-price production values don't so much poke through as parade around, stark naked, inviting you to ogle their wobbly bits. There are obvious flaws here, many of which have been made infamous thanks to hilarious (and unsafe for work) YouTube videos. It's got the word 'simulator' in the title - nerdiness should come as standard.

Farming simulator xbox 360 review Pc#

Farming Simulator isn't nearly nerdy enough, and that's the last criticism I expected to make of this console version of the ironically championed budget PC series.