This ensured I was always planting and harvesting new crop types as the seasons changed with each sleep. Alternatively – for a less intense experience – you can set the game to real-time but make each game day equivalent to a month. You can also tweak how time passes so, if you’re after a hectic schedule, you can set time to move swiftly so that you’ll be tackling a new task each day of the month. To give you just a taste of the depth on offer: you can purchase new plots of land enter an isometric build mode to purchase new structures for your farm pick between favourable or tough market conditions toggle the need to periodically till, de-stone, lime, and fertilize fields to keep yields high decide whether vehicles will damage crops they move through them or maybe allow your AI helpers to automatically buy the resources they need for any assigned task. These cover the basics like preparing a field, seeding it, harvesting, selling produce, and assigning those tasks to an AI employee – but they rarely go into fine detail or explain your options when it comes to tweaking gameplay parameters. Assuming you’re playing the standard sandbox mode, you’ll pick a difficulty – which affects starting funds and potential debt – lightly customise your avatar, pick a map, and then be thrust into the game with a few icons that offer either an incredibly brief tutorial or just link to the extensive in-game manual.

Building an empireīefore covering the new content, I thought I’d give any newcomers a quick idea of what to expect. Each offers a distinct atmosphere and topography but all offer town centres with agricultural stores and equipment dealers different businesses that’ll store, transport, and buy produce businesses you can purchase to fabricate goods and, with the expansion map, town projects you can contribute resources towards. The new map, which offers an environment based on the heavily forested Pacific Northwest (Silverrun Forest), has far less arable land and is the best pick for returning players or those uninterested in juggling multiple fields. The original three include a recreation of the American midwest (Elmcreek), a southern French valley (Haut-Beyleron), or the Swiss Alps (Erlengrat) – all of which focus on traditional crop or livestock farming. It’s a rough start and, if you’re a newcomer, you’d be wise to pick one of the four official maps on offer in the Farming Simulator 22: Platinum Edition. It’s all about early planning (which you can mess up royally), some hands-on work, assigning tasks to the AI, investing profits into new ventures or expanding the ones you have, and – ideally – optimising every step of the process as you go.

Now despite the flashy opening cutscene that highlights the hard work required for successful farming, you’re swiftly dropped into sandbox environments with no narrative context, no structured story, and no end goal. If you’re willing to work through a steep learning curve and come to grips with the dense interface, it provides an engaging and cathartic time-sink. It remains a weirdly compelling experience that offers mechanically fiddly, management-heavy, methodical busy-work coupled with immersion-breaking jank, like triggering actions with no animation or watching your harvester backflip over a fallen tree trunk.

The good news, for both those curious about the IP and existing players looking to return, is that Farming Simulator 22: Platinum Edition provides the forestry-focused excuse you need. I’d hazard a guess the audience is either people doing farming-related desk jobs or those with a romantic view of the profession as I expect few farmers would have the time to sink into open-ended sandbox sessions. I’m forever amazed at the success of the Farming Simulator IP.

Farming simulator xbox 360 review