Review: Farming Simulator 15

I’m not sure about you, but after a long hard day at work, I love to sit down to a long hard days work.

Out now on every console you own, including both Playstations and both Xboxes, is Farming Simulator 15, called such because it is the 2015 version and is also the number of stress induced strokes and heart attacks I suffered, in as many minutes, while trying to lift a log into a pond.

As is often the case in games which wash over me like this, leaving me stressed, nervous and incredulous like a first day at a new job, I keep going back to see if I can figure out why I’m supposed to be playing it. The game is ‘Farming Simulator 15’ but depending on your knowledge of farming it could very quickly turn into ‘Screaming incredulously at Corn 15’ or ‘Where the hell is my plough 15’

The first thing to realise if, like me, you are uninitiated in simulator games, which is a grotesquely popular genre, is that these are not games in the strictest sense. Sure you sit down in front of a pc, xbox or playstation, and sure you have missions you have to do but they are they are often quite general and the ‘game’ doesn’t really give you much indication of success or even if you are doing things incorrectly.

This is the point however, and as a game about chainsawing trees and planting seeds and the like it is a very good way to know what it feels like to be an inexperienced farmer.

I had found a strange experience in asking myself what the hell slurry was actually for and more understandably shocked at how I could sell a dozen eggs for close to two hundred and fifty dollars.

Inexperienced as I am, I foolishly wasted all my money buying sheep and accidentally lost my plough while I was searching for my cow, never to be seen again.

Be it Train, Farming or Robot Vacuum Cleaner, these games are appallingly popular to somebody.

Farming simulator, is the first one I’ve played since a flight simulator on an Amiga 500+ back before you were born and I am terrible at it. Ever given a girlfriend or brother a ‘wee go’ on grand theft auto and had to explain to them why you ‘can’t open that door…it’s just scenery’ or laughing and saying “No, no you just follow the map” where the laugh is actually just a ruse, the closest thing you can do to a full Sindel style scream in their face without offending them.

Fortunately after playing Project Cars my skills of driving had been gloriously mocked by video games and now I was faced with a new challenge, which was driving between 6 and 25 miles an hour with a £25,000 pound log-lifter attached to my tractor, while trying to find gold coins. While attempting to lift an entire tree I nearly brutally murdered my ‘guy’ and destroyed his expensive equipment.

There are 100 hundred gold coins scattered around the farm, and I decided to run around trying to find them, (after ten they all show up on the map) as an attempt to possibly stumble over my trailer so I could sell corn again.

I failed of course, but the game did have a feeling of a rather relaxing, stress free version of Skyrim. ‘Finding money in the street simulator 15’ has an obscene amount of stuff to do and if you know your front loader from your …I actually can’t think of anything else, then you will absolutely love this.

I have it on good authority that in the more rural, Farmy areas of Northern Ireland that this game is about as popular as thick accents, the Balmoral show, and mistakenly thinking Belfast is a large city.

Farming Simulator is great, as farming simulators go I imagine, but for those of you who loved Farmville or Animal Crossing this is about as close to those titles as Mario Kart is to Project CARS. Now I must go because I still can’t find any of my machinery.