![]() Having played a serious amount of PSVR recently, there’s a lot of experiences on that platform that thrive by putting you on edge. Indeed, Farming Simulator is one of those calming games that could almost pass for meditation. Working the fields earns money, money buys you shiny new machines that can produce food quicker, which earns more money to buy more shiny things and on and on the cycle goes until you realise it’s 2am and you forgot to feed your cat for three days, but at least your virtual cows are happy. There is something inherently satisfying in amassing money and checking tasks off a virtual checklist, and video games have been using this to exploit the part of us simple, needy humans that seeks completeness for some time. Obviously this sort of game makes a lot of its management features the sort of thing that made Farmville so popular with all those people who never say anything interesting on Facebook but are happy to tell you how their fucking virtual chickens are getting on. But there’s something about Farming Simulator 17 that has really pulled me in, inadvertent creepiness aside. It’s appearing at around £30 at most places not bargain pricing but not exactly Call of Duty either. This is, however, something of a budget title. ![]() It’s no coincidence this appeared in time for Halloween, is it? ![]() You’re blocked from leaving the town by invisible walls across the roads, happily adding claustrophobia and a nice Cabin In The Woods vibe in to the mix. Points of interest like garden centres are utterly deserted, and the lack of recognisable music or convincing background noise makes everything feel alienating, disconcerting and not quite like the jolly farm-em-up you may be expecting. On occasions when you have to drive across the whole map it’s possible to encounter maybe one car and almost no people, if you don’t get too near the centre (and even then it’s hardly Mardi Gras). Combine this emptiness with doing nothing but farming crops, and this feels like a better Walking Dead game than you’d ever get from Telltale (or in fact any game you’d get from Telltale, unless you really like reading boring graphic novels). This is presumably unintentional, and mostly down to the lack of inhabitants in your chosen farming town. The levels of eeriness are enough to rival a fair few survival horror games. The vehicles handle badly too… This is turning into quite a list.īut bizarrely, it’s the atmosphere of the game that is most unsettling. In addition to all of this, the movement is unrealistic and the maps are fairly small when we’ve been spoilt by so many huge play areas of late. The noise of a passing car appears suddenly and disappears abruptly, and there’s no spoken dialogue, just unimaginative text boxes. While walking around your farm you have no music, so are just left with a strange sense of disquiet, and when you enter a vehicle you’re given a limited choice of radio stations, all of which play the sort of tossed-off ideas you’d find on the debut demo from someone who just started learning guitar after having a midlife crises. Regarding what you get from the speakers, you may as well stick the game on mute from the start. This is all despite a promising little intro that shows you some very arty animations of tractors looking all sexy and alluring in various stages of sunrise. Trees pop into view and pop out again, while the HUDs and menus look incredibly basic and about twenty years out of date. Drive through a cornfield in a more standard vehicle and the corn simply appears through the car, like it’s growing out of the roof. On first inspection the visuals aren’t terrible as such, but moving around and exploring the world you’re presented with will quickly uncover plenty of rough edges. Graphically and sonically, this is not going to win any awards. So, let’s get those cons out of the way first, shall we? Unfortunately, there are quite a few. Triple A it is not, however, and there are plenty of things in the way of the core to put off plenty of people, but at the centre of it there’s some serious involvement to uncover here. Which is a shame, because Farming Simulator 17 is, at its core, a good game. The ‘Simulator’ games are often the subject of some derision and misplaced praise from the sort of tossers that only like things ironically and have entirely forgotten what it feels like to enjoy anything more. They owe us a lot, and I cant be alone in thinking that a decent video game would go some way to compensating for this.Įnter Farming Simulator 17. Basically, most people don’t see daylight between October and March because of farmers. Part of the reason for this is so farmers during the world wars had more daylight to work their fields in the morning. It’s probably dark, isn’t it? Last week we had to put the clocks back an hour so it’s basically pitch black all the time now for most people’s waking moments.
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