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Farming Simulator 2013 (Xbox 360) Review

 
Farming-Simulator-2013
Farming-Simulator-2013
Farming-Simulator-2013

 
At a Glance...
 

Formats: Xbox 360, PS3, PS Vita
 
Genre:
 
Year:
 
Publisher:
 
Developer:
 
Final Score
3.5
3.5/ 10


User Rating
1 total rating

 

We liked?


  • Wide array of well modeled farm machinery
  • Extra map not on PC editions
  • Offers some depth of play that you can sink many an hour in to

Not so much?


  • Glitchy and bland graphically
  • Hardly any actual simulation is present
  • Economy is basically broken - especially by the mini-quests that pay far too much
  • Becomes tedious and boring very quickly to all but a few hardened players


Final Fiendish Findings?

Farming Simulator 2013 is an oddity. A curio wrapped in a zeitgeist and unleashed in the strange no man’s land that is the later years of a consoles life-cycle. It offers something very different to what you normally find on store shelves – I just wish it was a little bit more like a real simulator for farms rather than a farm vehicle playground.

0
Posted September 17, 2013 by

 
Full Fiendish Findings...
 
 

Farming Simulator 2013 is somewhat of a cult hit over on the PC.  Not so much for its accuracy and thoroughness in emulating the farming life.  Now it’s more known for its crazy YouTube videos and weird glitches.

That hasn’t stopped developer Giants Software from seizing the opportunity and pushing through some home console versions of the game.

Farming Simulator 2013 on the Xbox 360 is faithful enough to the PC original.  Offering a similar experience to playing the PC edition on medium settings.  The PC original also has support for an Xbox 360 controller so the control scheme has already been worked out posing no awkward translations from keyboard to controller.

Unlike the PC counterpart the Xbox 360 iteration of Farming Simulator 2013 adds a second location for budding farmers to ply their trade on.  The small town map, that accompanies the original rural farmland maps, offers similar trappings to the original map but with added small town America trappings like diners etc.

Premise wise I think you can guess what the game is about.  Tend your farm, sow your seeds, harvest, plough and start again.  It’s probably easier to think of Farming Simulator 2013 as more of a farming vehicle simulator than as one the accurately models the workings of a farm.  For instance it’s more about riding your tractor and trailer to the local grain store than it is about crop rotation and soil quality.

Simply ride to an area of the farm, make sure you’ve prepared the land, sow your seeds (picked up from sporadic refill points around your farm) and wait for the plants to slowly grow.  Once grown you then hop on to your harvester, drop the blades and harvest away until the harvester is full.  Deposit that freshly harvested crop in a trailer and repeat until the trailer is full.

gaming-farming-simulator-screenshot-1

Once your trailer is full then you can either store it for a short amount of time in a silo or take it to be sold – this is accomplished by driving to a distribution point and depositing your load.  With this accomplished it’s game over.. oh wait not it’s not.  No you get to do it all over again… repeatedly… until you snap!

You see, having just spent a frustrating and mind-numbing hour completing just this simple of operations it slowly dawns on you that perhaps life on the farm isn’t all it’s cracked up to be!  Tedious job after tedious job starts to line up.  Sure, you can hire a worker to finish jobs for you.  For instance locate a field that needs to be harvested, click the button and a worker will appear in your vehicle’s cab and start the operation for you.  That’s all well and good if they actually stuck to their tasks and didn’t inexplicably just stop seemingly at random.

Graphically the game is rudimentary at best. Sparse landscapes struggle to bubble in to view as pop-up and texture pop litter the games world.  Buildings are basic at best and the look of your crops as they grow is shoddy at best.  The vehicles do, in all honestly, look good.  They represent their respective vehicle types well and move in a way you might expect.  A full install will set you back less than 300MB on your Xbox’s hard drive so you get that we’re not talking about gigabytes of high res textures here.

Talking of movement frame rate is sporadic and at best optimistic.  Travelling seemingly vast distances on these farming machines is made even more tedious by the fact that you get stuck so often on glitchy terrain and other level geometry.  So much so I had to get one of my tractors to come and physically knock another out of some scenery it had become embedded in whilst tacking a full load of grain for sale.

Selling your wares is not the only means of income in Farming Simulator 2013.  Every so often, at a time you can dictate, small side missions will be messaged to you.  Normally this is a “Deliver X to Y” type of job that you accomplish in one of your array of vehicles.  These are mindless distractions at best but offer a ludicrous monetary reward that is in no way in relation to the action taken.  For instance you could sell your entire trailer of hard grown wheat for $1000, or you could deliver a spoon to someone for $5000…. OK that was a made up job BUT the monetary discrepancies are accurate.  It just totally undermines the point of the game.

gaming-farming-simulator-screenshot-3

Final Thoughts

Farming Simulator 2013 for Xbox 360 is much less than its PC counterpart, even with the additional map to explore.

The crazy glitches and the ability to exploit those via a video service like YouTube to make some funny videos is what shot the original Farming Simulator to the front of people’s minds.  This is irrelevant here.

Barely undertaking the simplest of farming simulation this game is more about messing about with the various farm machinery.  For something with “simulator” in the title I would expect even the mildest of attempts at a real simulation.  Instead what we have is simple and pleasant enough if you’re not looking for something too grand.  You can easily pass away many an hour just planting and arranging your crops and making sure the farm is turning a profit.  Technical issues to drag the game down, as do frustrating mechanics that only increase the tedious nature of the game.  This is not a game for those who tire easily.

Farming Simulator 2013 is an oddity.  A curio wrapped in a zeitgeist and unleashed in the strange no man’s land that is the later years of a consoles life-cycle.  It offers something very different to what you normally find on store shelves – I just wish it was a little bit more like a real simulator for farms rather than a farm vehicle playground.


Zeth

 
Zeth is our EU ninja and Editor in Chief. He's been writing about video games since 2008 when he started on BrutalGamer. He's pretty old and has been a gamer since he played Space Invaders as a young boy in the 80's. His genre tastes lean towards platformers, point-and-click adventure, action-adventure and shooters but he'll turn his hand to anything.


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