None of the many potential environmental, ethical or financial hazards/opportunities real farmers encounter ever troubles virtual farmers in FS15. While real farming deals with everything from drought to dust bowls to GMO crop ethics, to going “boutique” as a fair-trade organic premium supplier versus selling your beef to a fast food conglomerate.
The game really is about just making enough money to buy more real estate and better equipment. And that, perhaps, is the most limiting factor of all. FS15 eschews all this in favor is just getting right into the farming for profit.
Most simulation games-like the recent Tropico 5-have a campaign with a structured narrative and goals, and a sandbox mode for people that just want to use all the toys made available. The game throws you into the deep end with a few fields and tractors and leaves you to your own devices. The lack of a campaign is another missed opportunity for the game. There are numerous online guides dedicated to getting newbies started in the Farming Simulator series, and while it’s great they’re out there, it’s damning that they stand in for a decent tutorial or introductory campaign. Very basic tutorials, for example, show you the general flow of raising crops, and there are other individual tutorials for the different kinds of equipment, but it’s similar to a tradesman showing you basic electrical wiring, plumbing 101, and a bit of carpentry, then saying, “Now go build a house.” Sure, you’ve got a bunch of different skills you’ve just learned, but no comprehensive way to see how they interlock together. However, for all the things you can do in Farming Simulator 15, what really hurts the game is how limited-and newbie unfriendly-the scope of being a farmer actually is. GIANTS have taken the wealth of commands for various actions and somehow managed to compress them onto a DualShock 4. All of it is done in either first person, or third, from behind the vehicle you’re controlling. You steer combine harvesters, you cultivate fields with tractors, you even go logging, chopping down trees, or collecting eggs from your chicken coops. On the actual gameplay front, this is a real time-not turn-based-simulator, and everything is pretty hands on. Sound is also a bit limited, with no speech or background music, just the occasional birds, chickens, rainfall and the constant, hypnotic drone of various tractor engines, so get your Spotify account ready to stream. On the other hand, despite the massive size, you can “teleport” from one vehicle to the next across the entire sprawling map, with no loading whatsoever, so while the game is limited in technical prowess, it’s very responsive. However, despite nice graphical touches like dirt accumulating on vehicles, day/night cycles and weather effects, pop up and draw in is evident everywhere, and there are even occasional dips on framerate.
The studio has created two massive environments-European and North American farm settings-as the playgrounds for your farming exploits. Having said that, the game gives a LOT of freedom in the way you can tackle being a farmer, just don’t expect to be visually blown away in the process.
That’s the “story” of Farming Simulator 15, there’s no real campaign mode to speak of. You’re a farmer and you want to make money to own more property and have better equipment. Now, there’s a current gen console version available, and while in some ways, it’s a worthwhile game, in others, it’s problematic. The franchise has sold over a million copies, and it’s not just families, but actual farmers that sit down and enjoy the game. Believe it or not, Farming Simulator despite not being a big deal in the AAA gaming world, is actually a big enough deal that multiple titles have already been released.