Farming Simulator 22: I never thought I would say that, but beets are very exciting
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In addition to our 2021 Major Game Awards, every member of the PC Gamer team has focused on the games they love this year. For the rest of this month, we will release the new employee draft and our main awards.
For many years, I have been curious about the Farming Simulator series, but I have never really played it because it seems too complicated. My idea of farming in the game is to tap some dirt while holding the seed, and then come back a few hours later to find a fully grown ear of corn, which I can grab and stuff it directly into my mouth. At most I might add some animal manure as fertilizer, and then pour a can of water from time to time. I think it is expert mode.
But I finally jumped into Farming Simulator 22 with both feet, and I can report—well, yes, it Yes Too complicated. For the first few hours, I used alt-tab to browse a wiki or watch a video every few minutes. These videos would show me how to do basic things, such as mowing or feeding cows.
That’s because, to be honest, agriculture Yes As complex as hell, mowing or feeding cows is a multi-step process that requires a bunch of different machines, usually connected and pulled by another machine. And these machines are not like GrassMaster X1 or Cow-Feeder 9000. Click and scroll through the menu while gazing at the huge shiny metal and rotating blades, named Claas Jaguar 960 Terra Trac or Case IH Autostoft 8800 Multi-Row, it is difficult to know where to find you even if you know what you need Something needed. There is a very extensive in-game help menu that lists the general steps of how to do agricultural things (then let you do another thing, then another thing, and finally what you really want to do), but rarely For starters, it is intuitive.
But when. It was very satisfying to find out how to do some farming, and then do the farming correctly, even if (or especially because) it might take months of play time. It is a rush to cultivate, cultivate, sow, observe crop growth, harvest, collect, sell, or use it to create products. Even things that sound simple like transporting grain and throwing it to a flour mill are almost exciting, because no single step is actually simple.
These machines, despite their indifferent names, are amazing at runtime.As I said when I first started playing, the various equipment in Sim Farm 22 are As cool as a sci-fi spaceship. It is very interesting to watch the harvester fill up the water while chewing on the field, see the baler spit out a beautiful cylinder of hay, or use the feller to cut the tree trunk into perfect logs. Harvesting a beet field sounds ordinary and ordinary, but it is also very spectacular, especially if you spent tens of thousands of dollars on rental machinery to grow these beets a few months ago.
Despite its complexity, “Simulation Farm 22” is still friendly to novices to some extent. Consider all the different things you can grow—cotton, wheat, corn, potatoes, sorghum, grapes, olives, sunflowers, etc., plus cattle, chickens, and even bees—but you don’t need to bite off more than you can chew. I started with a small piece of land and only focused on learning how to grow a crop. Although I spent a little money and did a poor job, I still did it. When I was finished, I felt like a damn farmer. Beginners can also turn off certain settings, such as seasonal crops, crop wilting, weeds, etc., to easily enter the simulation game, instead of trying to solve all the problems at once.
As Luke pointed out Our reviewWhen it comes to some landscapes and character models, the series can be more personalized, even just a little style. This is a beautiful-looking game, but it’s not completely full of style. And artificial intelligence can use more brainpower-I have been hit by the horrible artificial intelligence driver more than once on the side of the road, and the computer-controlled workers you can hire often show poor judgment (or no judgment) when driving vehicles or equipment. force) .
Despite playing for 20 hours, I still feel that I am an absolute beginner. I still often need to press alt-tab to read a quick guide or watch a video on how to do what I want to do. But I hardly even scratched the surface of all the different crops and how to farm and profit from it, which made me want to learn. If the next piece of land I plant is as satisfying as my first few pieces, I think I will cultivate it for a while.