It wasn't long after I began taking part in Farming Simulator 15 that my eyes began to glaze over. It’s not because of the subject material, which at its best I actually found oddly relaxing as I cultivated, sowed, and harvested my FS17 [1] fields, up one row and down the other, with nothing however my thoughts and the diesel roar of my Deutz-Fahr to maintain me company. The trouble is that underneath, it's not really much of a simulation at all. It is just tractor porn.
I was initially passionate about Farming Simulator 15 because of the plain effort that went into creating its undeniably impressive array of agricultural machinery. Tractors and attachments look fantastic, with switches, knobs, and buttons all the place they should be, plus flashing lights, augers that move realistically, and even caked-on dirt that looks ‘right.’
But far much less attention to detail has been paid to the remainder of the game. Despite the fact that I opted to play in the US, as an illustration, my earnings were measured in euros, not dollars; posted velocity limits were fifty five, yet the speedometers in my tractors measured KM/H, not MPH. No effort to truly "Americanize" the setting was made past slapping red, white, and blue on just about every little thing within eyesight. [Correction: It's attainable to vary measurements, though this oversight has little bearing on the overview's conclusion.]
That superficiality goes all the way in which down. The physics are a joke—roaring over and off of rocky outcroppings reminded me of driving the Mako in Mass Effect—and I moved ghost-like by means of absolutely-grown fields, bushes, and even pedestrians, none of which registered any hint of my passing. Yet picket fences and clotheslines stopped me as fast and as dead as if I would hit the ground after jumping out of a plane. With some effort, I managed to overturn my tractor, solely to study that there is not any option for getting it upright aside from hopping into one other tractor—happily, I had a number of—and smashing it around till it bounces back up on its wheels.
The time acceleration mechanic is especially bizarre. Farming Simulator 15 will run at up to a hundred and twenty occasions regular velocity, however the setting affects only the passage of game time, and never the real speed at which something moves or will get done. At regular velocity, I completed a single cultivator go by a small subject in less than one minute; at 120 instances regular, that very same cross took hours and 50 minutes of game time. I thought it is perhaps different if I left the job to a hired hand, the game's way of automating jobs, but it surely was precisely the same: Accelerated time passes by much more shortly, however the world crawls alongside at an unchanged rate.
Mowing lawns
Farming Simulator 15 is a really unguided game. I started with several tractors, primary implements, and a subject of wheat ready to be harvested. But as soon as that was finished, I used to be solely on my own, a situation not helped by the largely uninformative tutorial and a brief instruction guide that explains the essential mechanics but little else.
Commodity costs fluctuate based mostly upon provide, however while arrows beside each commodity type indicate whether or not its value is up, down, or stable, there isn't any report of past costs, gross sales, or anything that makes the game feel like something coherent is happening underneath the hood. Not that it really matters anyway, due to the ridiculously generous side missions: I made almost 20,000 euros in a single day by completing three grass-reducing jobs. Worse, I was given the identical yard to cut, each single time