Farming Simulator is a simulation. Of a farm. Bet you'd never have guessed... Although it isn't, perhaps as you'd expect, a number crunching management game where you sit back and twiddle with sliders for cattle, feed and crops. The game throws you into the thick of the action, doing all the stuff farmers do, getting their hands dirty down in the fields, operating the big machinery, and driving tractors along public roads holding up all the traffic while chewing a piece of corn and whistling. It stops short of taking up a shotgun and blasting away at rabbits and trespassing ramblers, but you get the idea.

You still manage the farm, but at a nuts and bolts ground level. While the economic side of the game is fairly simple, there is a market and fluctuating prices to monitor, and you make the decision to grow barley because the local brewery is short on supply and paying well. Having made that decision, however, it's you who must drive the tractor and plough the field, then sow the barley seed, then spray it, and then get the combine out to harvest it.

All this is done by hooking up the appropriate attachments in the farmyard - reversing the tractor up carefully and so forth - and then operating them with some skill. Driving down those fields in a straight line is more difficult than it looks, as you have to make constant minor adjustments to the steering. And some of those fields are seriously large, and it takes a certain sort of patient player to really get into the atmosphere of Farm Simulator. Some people won't like it, simply because it's a slow paced, open-ended game.

And it's fairly bewildering for the novice to begin with. While there are some tutorial missions which do a decent job of explaining some of the basics, when you're dropped into the sandbox campaign, it's difficult to know where to begin. Ploughing a few fields and growing some crops is an obvious first step, but what then? More ploughing? Perhaps you should buy a couple of cows... but what was it cows need to eat again? Grass and something else... chopped corn was it? And which of the game's bazillion attachments chops corn?

The manual is flimsy, and the in-game help likewise, which means clueless newbies who don't know their Vogel and Noot Terratop 800 from their Horsch Tiger 6MT are going to be doing some head scratching. We'd really have preferred a more structured tutorial, or indeed a more structured campaign, because as it is, the career mode is completely open-ended with no guidelines or help (save for the odd scattered piece of advice).

Having said that, when you start to suss the game out, it becomes more enjoyable seeing your empire thrive. There are some reasonably interesting decisions to make about whether to upgrade your equipment, and which pieces to upgrade, or perhaps to concentrate on dairy farming rather than crops so much. Hands can also be hired to help, and these automated drivers take the strain out of some of the bigger jobs, like the tediously vast fields. They can be dumb at times, however: we found our AI controlled plough had driven into and got stuck on a scarecrow at one point.

The developer has injected some charm into the surroundings, with the environment including a local village, complete with church and tolling bells on the hour. You can even hike off on foot to explore the ruins of a castle on top of the nearby mountain pass (don't forget your packed lunch). These are smart touches, as are the little boats that chug down the rivers, and cars on the roads. Although the car drivers seem to have about as much road sense as the love-child of George Michael and Maureen from Driving School, happily causing accidents by pulling out right in front of you at junctions. All this is rendered with a decent level of visual finery, even if the draw distance is very close (so bushes only pop into view when you're almost on top of them).

With the 2011 version of the game, not only have cows been introduced for extra spice, but there's also a multiplayer mode, so you can now co-operatively run a farm with a bunch of crop happy mates. The game has a fairly active mod community, too, with the potential to download new farm environments which have been mapped out by other players, custom vehicles and so on.

There are some balance issues - dairy farming seems overly lucrative, for instance - but on the whole, Farming Simulator certainly has some appeal. Particularly for more thoughtful gamers who enjoy a slower paced game, and farm fans who will get off on driving the various different and increasingly sophisticated lumps of heavy machinery around. Some sort of better tutorial is needed for total beginners, however. As it is, they'll probably feel much like we did in the first few hours of the game, unable to tell our elbows from our posterior (or perhaps that should be our feet from our mouth).

Verdict
If you've always dreamed of managing and working a farm, complete with your own array of tractors, combines, sprayers, ploughs, rotor tedders, cultivators and so forth, now's your chance. Farm Simulator 2011 does a decent job of presenting a hands-on farming experience with a management overview, although the campaign mode could use more structure, and beginners would certainly benefit from a better tutorial.

Company: Excalibur

Tags: farm driving school george michael crop cattle dairy farming tractor farmville