I was never really into farming as a kid. While some children obsess over tractors and farming equipment, I was more interested in dinosaurs and spaceships. I do, however, have distinct memories of passing fields full of sheep and cows on the way to a family holiday in the south of England, and I have even more distinct memories of the smell of manure permeating the car and sticking in your nostrils long after the farm itself has disappeared over the horizon. Thankfully, Farming Simulator 19 doesn’t come with the smell of natural fertilizer, but it does promise to be the next best thing when it comes to pretending to establish your own farming empire.
This was my first foray into the Farming Simulator series, and I have to admit that I was unprepared for the sheer amount of depth available to players. This isn’t a Farmville or Stardew Valley kind of farming, where you click on a patch of earth, plant a seed and then come back two days later to sell your wares at market. In Farming Simulator 19, you do everything from ploughing the soil to adding fertilizer, then planting crops, harvesting them, taking them to market and then replenishing the soil ready for the next crop. That’s just for crops, mind, as you can also raise animals, sell lumber, and complete contracts for your fellow farmers.
There are pretty solid tutorials available for those new to the series, or players who want a refresh, and these range from learning how to set up a farm to how to use various pieces of equipment and how to perform certain tasks. What I really appreciated about these tutorials is that they didn’t just show you the button combinations required to execute the actions that they were describing, they also took the time to explain why you would want to do things a certain way or using a particular piece of equipment, and what the benefits would be for doing so. I’m not trying to say that Farming Simulator 19 would teach you anywhere near as much as spending a season on a real, working farm, but I certainly came out the other side of the game with a greater understanding and greater respect for those who spend their lives dedicated to providing food for our tables.
When you first boot up the game, you’re given a couple of choices, related to how realistic you want the experience to be, and where you would like to start your farming experience. Difficulty choices range from having a farm already established, having no farm but enough capital to be relatively free to decide how you want to begin, and having little money and no farm, meaning that you’re essentially starting from scratch. You’re also able to choose between farming in an American or European setting, by choosing Ravenport or Felsbrunn, respectively. What’s great about Farming Simulator 19 is that it actively promotes its modding community, with an icon right on the home screen, meaning that you can add equipment, maps and even gameplay modifiers right from the start. There’s a healthy selection of mods available at the time of writing, and I can imagine that that would only grow as time goes on.
Each of the maps is large, and thanks to an updated graphics engine, both look pretty good, though there are some issues with textures from time to time. One thing that I have to mention, though, is the level of detail put into the farming equipment, all of which look great and almost as if they’ve been pulled directly from a product catalogue. As you explore each map, you’ll start to learn landmarks and routes, and you’ll soon know the area surrounding your farm as well as you do the area surrounding your house in the real world. One disappointment I did have, however, is that the world doesn’t feel especially alive. You’ll see AI-driven cars on the roads, but the contracts that you’re given are by static icons on a menu screen, and the workers that you can hire are designated by number rather than name. I would have appreciated a better sense of community during my time with the game, as helping another farmer out feels more like ticking a set of boxes rather than giving a potential new friend or business partner a hand.
The other roadblock that I found with Farming Simulator 19 is kind of a double-edged sword, in that some players will definitely appreciate the areas that I didn’t enjoy. I found that once you got past the starting tutorial, the game effectively lets you off the leash, and allows you to do whatever you want. While I appreciated the freedom, I found it all a little overwhelming, especially as I’m not familiar with any of the equipment, and how the series typically works. I enjoyed pottering around, helping out other farms and building my inventory of machinery, but I found that for the most part I was unsure of whether what I was doing was right and even sometimes whether I was playing the game correctly. This is likely due to carelessness on my part, but I also had a couple of instances where I had bought equipment that was completely unsuited for the job I was trying to do, and farming equipment isn’t cheap, meaning that I had to then go back and earn more money before I could proceed further.
All in all, though I was surprised by how much I enjoyed playing Farming Simulator 19. It was nice to come home from work and load the game up, with its slow-paced, almost tranquil experience providing a nice cooldown from the hectic workdays preceding it. The more I played, the more I understood and appreciated the workings of the game, and if I was to start a new save game, I can imagine that a lot of the uncertainties about how to proceed would be gone, and I’d be able to get my farm up and running a lot quicker. This is a game with incredible depth, and the modding community will only help to deliver more content on top of an already large experience. If you have even the slightest inclination to pretend to be a farmer, then Farming Simulator 19 is a great option to try, and it may just get you hooked. Just don’t blame me if you start putting country music stations on your car radio’s preset buttons.
