Farming Simulator

Farming Simulator 2013 is a well-crafted, sober and functional game. Not "fun", but full of agricultural vehicles to maneuver and tasks to be performed to get by your company. It will require a lot of patience, organizational skills… and virtual sweat.

At the end of the day, unless you’re an agriculture fanatic that is interested in the rush of cultivating and harvesting fields for hours on end, you’re likely to feel cheated by a lack of content, boring gameplay and unimpressive visuals. Ultimately, the farm life is exactly what I expected — a lot of hard work for very little pay off.

Farming Simulator does an excellent job of simulating farm life. Sadly that does not make a great game. The romantic view of the farmer life style is quickly replaced with mind numbing and hard work with few high points and rewards.

Fans of farming might enjoy this, but if you're not particularly fond of agriculture, we wouldn't recommend this game. To be sure, it's an incredibly deep experience, but sheer depth does not prevent a title like this from growing stale within a couple of hours. Repetitive gameplay, outright bizarre physics and mediocre visuals don't help either.

A purely basic simulator game. You plant, you cultivate, you harvest, you sell. That is the process over and over, with repetitive missions cropping unless you turn them off. If you’ve ever wanted to run a farm, then this is for you, but other than that there’s no real need for the game on console.

Farming Simulator 2013 is a mixed bag. It works in the most standard levels and it can be a very addictive game IF you allow it to be. The problem is, the tutorials and explanations are really barebones when looked at from the larger scale.

To convert us city boys to diehard farmers you are going to need some preparation or at least some decent tutorials. After eleven lengthy and mind numbingly boring tutorials however, we knew … absolutely nothing. [October 2013 p.93]

The game is all about making more money to progress, but the grind to get it is monotonous, meaning most will lose the will to toil away on the farm long before getting access to the bigger, better machinery.

Farming Simulator is nowhere near ripe enough for an unwavering recommendation, but budding agronomists will unearth the seeds of a compelling experience germinating beneath its grubby exterior. The title’s got more warts than an infected potato, but if you’re itching for something a little out of the ordinary, there’s the husk of an enjoyable husbandry excursion here.

There's farming, but little of the promised "simulation". [Dec 2013, p.73]

Nowhere near ripe enough to consume. Just a big ol' bale of boredom. [December 2013, p78]

Appalling textures, clunky systems and gameplay you have to shake yourself away from. [Dec 2013, p.95]

A lazy attempt at translating farming tasks to trivial gameplay. [Issue#140, p.119]

This console version of Farming Simulator is disappointing. The game is technically far below our expectations and it suffers from different gameplay problems. The simulation aspect is also insufficient to fascinate the fans.

An original idea that takes a turn for the worse. No strategy, depth or replayability in a game that forces the player to drive and watch the grass grow for hours on end.