The Farming Simulator franchise is undoubtedly one that everyone has heard of at least once, but most people will never have touched. It’s a game that farmers go home and play because they love their lifestyle so much, and certain streamers enjoy playing because of the deep management mechanics that can be found in each title. We’ve had access to the latest entry, Farming Simulator 22, for a while now, and these are our thoughts on the game so far.
What’s good?
There’s a lot to like about Farming Simulator 22. If you’re someone who likes to get up in the morning to start their day by exercising or sneaking in a few hours on their side hustle, then you’ll be familiar with the feeling you get while playing. This is a game about the ceaseless grind of land management and the eventual payoff that comes when you sell a truckload of grain at an astonishing price.
Of course, there’s also the fact that you get to drive more than 400 accurately recreated farming vehicles, as well as all of the accessories that go with them. A single tractor can cost more than a house, which is why it feels so great to pick one up in-game and drive it recklessly around your fields while you do what you hope counts as farming.
Farming Simulator 22 has more products for you to work on than any entry that’s come before. You can focus on livestock, orchards, or crops, but you can go even deeper if you’d like to. For example, you can take your grains, make flour, and turn that into a cake to sell at the local farm shop. You can also carefully manage your grapevines and produce some exceptional juice that will be wine. There’s more than ever for you to do in this title, and you get the smug sense of satisfaction that comes at the end of a long day in which you know you’ve done as much as you possibly can.
What’s not so good?
The only major complaint we have of Farming Simulator 22, other than the awkward AI system that seems to have been fixed with a pre-release patch, is the lack of guidance. You don’t play this franchise if you’re not already fully aware of how farming works and how to play. At the same time, though, this makes the title incredibly unfriendly to newcomers.
We spent many hours figuring things out that felt like they could have been explained in a brief tutorial or story mode that served the same purpose. However, it’s hard to criticize the game for not having a story mode because the key demographic has no desire to play it.
Impressions so far
In Farming Simulator 22 so far, we’ve spent more time tracking down locations, trying desperately to understand why we need a tractor weight, and swearing at the screen while an AI worker sat uselessly doing nothing. However, after we’d finally harvested our first field and tipped the back of the trailer up to deliver it, the sense of accomplishment and sheer joy that we felt when we were paid made it all worthwhile.
As we’ve already mentioned, Farming Simulator 22 is a game about the grind that real-life farmers face every day. The opening cinematic might make it feel more bombastic and glamorous than it is, but it certainly sets you up for the hundreds of hours it’ll take you to get over your addiction to cultivating, sewing seeds, fertilizing, harvesting, and holding up traffic in obscenely large tractors.
