IS IT WORTH IT?! | A Review of Farming Simulator 19 in About 3 Minutes!
233Check out our complete review of Farming Simulator 19! We make game reviews, without the fluff!
Farming Simulator 19 is the latest in the long running series from Giants Software and Focus Interactive. It came out in 2018 and the goal of this review is to try to establish if it’s worth buying and playing in 2021.
Typically starting out with little to no starting capitol and a limited selection of vehicles, Farming Sim 19, much like it’s predecessors, gives you all the tools you need to create and manage your own virtual farm in a large and open sandbox world either alone or with friends on local or dedicated servers.
If you prefer to play alone but still wouldn’t mind an extra pair of hands around the farm though you’re in luck as you can hire AI workers to help out with basic field tasks such as ploughing and planting seeds, though for help with more advanced jobs like transporting goods across the map or operating a wheel loader, you’ll need to enlist the help of a 3rd party mod like Courseplay.
Rather than being a full blown realism simulator which can often get far too complicated and spreadsheety for a lot of players, Farming Simulator manages to blend realistic simulation with arcade to create a pretty well balanced game that’s immersive enough to keep the hardcore sim gamers happy, whilst also being accessible and fun for regular players that might not be super interested in the detailed ins and outs of farming and basically just want to enjoy the relaxing monotony of driving backwards and forwards across a field as they plough their field of fertilize their crops.
I first got involved in the series in FS2013 and I’d be lying if I said I was any sort of fan of farming at the time and knew little to nothing about the industry, but something about the way the game’s presented just feels comfortable, and it does a great job at not throwing loads of stats, rules and other daunting amounts of information at you or strictly telling you what to do and when to do it.
The game itself is fairly straight forward and easy to learn, and thanks to the built in tutorial and in-game wiki you can easily find your feet even if you’re a complete beginner.
There’s a good variety of crops to grow, you can breed animals, place new buildings and remove existing ones, do forestry work and even terraform the terrain in real time, and it’s topped off with some impressive visuals thanks to the upgraded graphics engine which makes use of a much more vibrant colour palette than the previous games that still looks great today.
The main flow of the game includes growing crops, raising animals and cutting down trees, and then selling the products for profit which goes into buying new vehicles, machinery and expanding your farm by buying more parcels of land which typically includes a field and the surrounding trees and grass.
You can create new fields on any land you own using a plough and then plant any of 14 crops including wheat, cotton, sunflowers and corn. The animals you can keep include pigs, cows, chickens, sheep and even horses which you have to ride for a certain amount of time each day to keep them stay in shape. All your crops need to be fertilized and groomed to remove any weeds, and depending on the difficulty you select, you need to occasionally plough and spray lime to keep the field in good condition. Animals need to be fed, watered and cleaned out regularly to stay happy and healthy.
To help make things easier there’s literally hundreds of officially licensed vehicles and equipment included in the base game like tractors, combine and forage harvesters, wind rowers and bale makers from recognisable brands such as New Holland, JCB and John Deere. There’s also a few optional DLC’s available which add even more brands to the mix like CLAAS and Grimme.
As if there weren’t already more vehicles in the game than you could ever possibly hope to use on a single farm, there’s also hundreds of high quality, user made mods on the built in mod hub which are completely free to download. Mods aren’t restricted to vehicles either, and there’s some extremely impressive maps and quality of life improvements that are definitely worth a look. I’d recommend checking out Stappenbach, Courseplay and Seasons for a more immersive experience.
There’s good support for a wide selection of controllers like regular racing wheels, gamepads, keyboard and mouse and even a dedicated farming sim steering wheel and side panel made by Logitech, though you might want to play around with the deadzones and sensitivities in the in-game menu to get it feeling how you like it as certain vehicles can get a bit twitchy under certain circumstances. There’s also some mods that help improve the steering and handling with certain controllers...*TooLong*
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