In the past decade, a new genre has taken shape in the industry – a simulator of a working profession: a builder, a loader, a bus driver, a miner.
It all ended with completely absurd examples, ridiculing the monotony and routine inherent in such projects – remember at least the rock simulator Rock Simulator. However, why did it end? The genre still feels great today, and the release of the new Farming Simulator from Giants Software is another confirmation of this.
What can an individual modern farmer do in general? Anything related to the production of agricultural products. Thanks to scientific and technological progress, work in the countryside can now be so well automated that it is possible for a small team to cope even with a farm of considerable size – with the proper competence, of course.
FS22 gives you the opportunity to experience every aspect of farming, from plowing fields to delivering produce for sale. If we take the classic mode, without multiplayer and modifications (with which the series has been successfully friends for a long time), then the player is free to do anything, from the restrictions – only the starting capital. However, the possibility of renting equipment and lending will help to cope with this inconvenience: you can do whatever your heart desires, even at high difficulty.
You buy your first land plot, you think about what is more profitable to do, and your eyes run wild – what is not grown here, from wheat to cotton. But the situation, in fact, is twofold: on the one hand, yes, there are many types of crops, some require special equipment for processing (for example, grapes), and on the other, harvesting the same wheat is almost no different from harvesting sunflower, even if headers are on combines and will be completely different. The versatile work is even more the same – take the same plowing.
Not without exceptions, of course, but in general, you should not admire the abundance of crops, it is better to look at the types of technology and how they are used – only this makes it clear the true level of variety in the game.
But all these tractors-combine-loaders are not just beautiful decorations. Each piece of equipment can be controlled, performing a lot of agricultural tasks. The most ordinary tractor can act in several roles, depending on what equipment it is used with: there is a plow, a cultivator, a seeder, a mower, a pitchfork, a bucket – you can’t list everything. A view from the cockpit is provided, and the equipment in most cases is not just a piece of iron attached to the front or rear: it has its own functions.
For example, the plow can be turned or folded, the angle of inclination and extension of the header change, sprayers fold and unfold, but there is nothing to say about the work of loaders, cranes and manipulators – there is generally complete realism.
Farming Simulator lives up to its name here. If you wish, you can delve into the settings and get to such subtleties as manual gear shifting and light signals (for example, turning on “turn signals”) – a good help for those who like to play, especially since FS is friendly with the steering wheel and pedals.
However, the gameplay itself is exactly the way it is portrayed in jokes about such games – more work than fun. You can admire how the plow is unfolded or how the combine pours grain into the truck, the first few times, and then the routine begins: you drive a tractor with a cultivator slowly crawling across the field, make a U-turn at the edge – and again until the field ends.
As I already said, the main types of work are similar to each other – just like plowing, for example, harvesting looks like, except that occasionally you have to empty the combine’s bunker. Activities such as haymaking and logging are a little out of the ordinary: it is not enough to mow the grass – it needs to be agitated for drying and collected in bales, which requires completely different equipment; and logging requires skill with a saw and a log loader.
Breeding animals in general is simpler – it is enough to bring food and drink and remove manure (it can also be used as fertilizer on your own fields), selling surplus livestock and products (milk, wool or eggs).
In general, the phrase “wasting time” fully characterizes the gameplay. Yes, there are rather flexible time acceleration settings (they can be changed on the fly), thanks to which the game year can be completed in a few real hours, but this does not help much – the farmer has too much to do. Alone, you should seriously get involved in FS22 with an eye on the availability of free time: harvesting even a medium-sized field takes a long time, and if you try to make serious profit with an eye to developing and expanding your farm, it becomes completely sad.
Hired workers help out a little – bots can help with the simplest work like plowing a field, but they often “lag”, they are far from being able to do everything, and there is not as much sense from them as you want. It’s good that their labor is relatively cheap, but the ratio of profit from the sale of products and prices in a hardware store evokes melancholy. The economy needs to be tuned separately – as long as it serves as a factor slowing down the development of the farm.
Cooperative multiplayer is another matter: here, if you find enough comrades, you can arrange a whole collective farm “Ilyich’s Way”, with the distribution of roles and responsibilities. You can also rent a dedicated server directly from the main menu (with up to 16 slots), but this pleasure is not free, as you understand.