Look, let me get this out of the way right up front, “There is absolutely nothing fun about farming,” there, I said it. Nothing about waking up before the sun rises and calling it a day when it sets can be considered fun. It’s backbreaking laborious work that pays less each season and punishes farmers for using genetically altered seeds by accident or because it blew over from another plot of land. Needless to say, a good simulation of this profession is sorely needed.
You see, simulation games hold a special place in my heart (right next to my love for Skip-It’s and slap bracelets). These sorts of games take what in real life are boring, mundane, and many times soul crushing professions and makes them fun. You can build and manage a city in SimCity (not fun IRL), have an entire second life in sec… The Sims (tricked you there for a second), be a pilot, run a shipping empire, or run a post office (you can read that adventure here), the list goes on and on.
It seems to have become my mission, my calling, to find a farming simulator that is both fun and rewarding. So far, out of the multitude of farming related games I have reviewed, the best one I could find only had me pry off eight of my finger nails due to sheer boredom. So it is with slight trepidation that I come into this review of Farming World from Excalibur Publishing.
Having review their last outing in Post Master and enjoying the relaxing pace of that game, I thought that today might very well have been the day that by quest for a decent farming simulation would come to an end. Alas, not only is Farming World a poor representation of running a farming empire, it’s an excruciatingly boring game. Even more strange is that the game seems to be built on top of the Post Master engine (a game I enjoyed) yet lacking many of that games features. At the end of the day Farming World just ends up feeling like a glorified Facebook game.
Even though the game is very limiting and devoid of many features that one would expect, things that are in play tend to be broken. The A.I. within the game is laughable at best. For the majority of my first several play-though I didn’t even realize there was another player working their own farm. Only when I was aimlessly meandering around the map out of sheer boredom did I realize that I wasn’t alone. Other issue arose as the game is missing options that you would expect to be in any building and management game. There is no ability (that I could find) to automatically feed any of the livestock you can have. This isn’t a big deal when your farm is smaller but having to click to feed becomes a nightmare when you have tons of barns in play. Another caveat of note is the fact that there is no way to cure disease when it hits any of your crops, but be sure that the game will give you huge visual cue that disease has hit.
Farming World has the requisite day/night cycles as well as seasonal chances that affect a many crops, but again this feature is wildly inaccurate. It can take anywhere of up to thirty minutes for your worker(s) to harvest their assigned crops. This isn’t game time, but real-world time that I speak of. Harvesting even a small-sized field will take what in-game amounts to several weeks. The games timer is also difficult to understand at times. You have the ability, like in most other Sims, to play in real-time, on medium speed, or on high-speed settings. The problem arises because real-world time… well, feels just as long it would take in real life. It’s painfully slow and makes the game a tedious affair. The medium setting does little to alleviate this and the high-speed setting gets its power from the Speedforce itself. One annoying bug related to the speed settings is that if you are on high-speed and a menu pops up informing you of something the game won’t pause, or even drop down to the slow setting.
Farming World could have been something really special in the casual Sim market, but it’s devoid of certain features that make casual games fun. A lack of automation and clearly set goals means you will actually doing very little ‘playing’ in Farming World. There are far better management Sims on Steam that will satiate your needs. Heck, just go pickup Excalibur’s previous title Post Master, a much better game on the same engine.
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