Farming Simulator 2011 Review

Farming Simulator Review

The biggest problem with the tutorials though isn’t that there’s so many of them, but rather that they are so needlessly fragmented and only occasionally supply you with the information you really need.

Do you till or seed a field first? Which attachment do you put on the tractor if you want to water the field? How does Farming Simulator 2011 handle the different seasons and how can you hire some farmhands to help you out? These are the pressing questions for newcomers, but the answers are few and far between and are presented with 15 minute guided tours of the empty valley around the farm and against-the-clock irrigation missions.

It doesn’t help that so many of the systems that comprise Farming Simulator feel and look dated enough to make Pong feel like the cutting edge. The graphics are terrible and, while the farmland that you’re given to play with in Farming Simulator’s only included map is certainly vast, it’s also very empty. You’re given no control of where to position your fields, instead you're dumped into a pre-set world where the boundaries are already laid out.


The lack of direction also extends as far as the failure scenarios too, by the way. Giants Software has, for some reason, put it so that a main road and river run by your farm, but there’s as little consequence to ploughing through traffic with your combine harvester as there is to running out of money or jumping off the top of a mountain. Farming Simulator may be striving to be some sort of virtual farmer’s bliss, but the lack of depth and consequences means it feels more like some interminable farmer’s purgatory.

Despite the flaws though, there is a unusual moreishness to Farming Simulator 2011. It requires incredible effort to sink enough time into the tutorials to get a grip on the game, plus more patience than an entire hospital to actually do anything when you’ve got hold of it… but once you’ve got things growing then it does actually feel rewarding. After you’ve learned to love – or at least to tolerate – the flat landscape and the fact that you can’t drive faster than a snail’s pace without the attachments flying off the back of your tractor then things get easier.


The problem, of course, is that getting to that stage is almost impossible. As if driving round and round for acres and acres at just 12mph wasn’t dull enough, then you can’t even console yourself with the fact that your artificial crops will look interesting. All you’re left with is a very plain, very lonely feeling simulator which doesn’t even have the grace to make the filler content fly by quickly. There is, for example, no way for you to zip instantly over to the cowsheds on the far side of the valley – so, lacking any faster transport, you have to resort to the trundling old tractor, again.

Farming Simulator 2011 doesn’t fall flat because the premise is faulty or because farming simulators as a concept are rubbish. Believe it or not there probably is room in the market for a very in-depth, very interesting farming game – a hardcore Farmville, if you will.

Instead, Farming Simulator 2011 struggles simply because it’s not very accessible and not very fun. It regains ground in a few places thanks to the modding potential and four-player co-op, but it still feels a bit hollow overall and the positives and negatives can only balance each other out, at best. It’s not terrible, just boring.

Score Guide