To borrow a quote from the world’s most famous farmer (though contestable right now), Jeremy Clarkson, “[farming] is a hard job, and I’m not just saying this to win favor with [farmers]. It’s a hard job.” Not only do you need to know how to own, operate, and maintain multiple machines, but you also need to figure out how not to get killed by them too. Developed by Swiss developer and publisher GIANTS Software, Farming Simulator 25 is the latest in a long line of titles, some of which were questionable for their time, and others showcase what a dad simulator really is.

You’ve never been closer to a pipe and a pair of slippers until you’ve stood over a field you’ve just harvested, cultivated, rolled, limed, fertilized, and gotten ready to plant. Only to realize you read the calendar wrong and green beans can’t be planted in August. There is nothing quite like Farming Simulator 25, with a new engine bringing technical and graphical improvements, GIANTS are practically rivaling SCS Software this time around. However, at the same time, you are also missing a few features at launch with the new release thanks to what I can only assume to be a multitude of reasons.

As far as I’ve found, and this could be an issue with the UI for the shop, there is one topper in the hundreds of machines and it is for sweet beats. The aforementioned UI, especially for the shop, is lacking when it comes to being able to find practically anything. While the new player onboarding is ok, it is easy to get lost knowing what to do. Very little of which is to say Farming Simulator 25 isn’t worth it, as in a little over a week, and with a couple of mods here or there, I’ve nearly put in 100 hours. Better still, I’ve done the old man thing of writing a planting calendar down on the numerous pads that surround me.

To say I’ve been engrossed with its simplicities and mundanities would be an understatement, though there certainly have been a few gripes to be had with Farming Simulator 25. From creating new saves not being explained with any tooltips, particularly when it comes to loans, to the benefits and disadvantages of certain maps. This year you can start in Riverbend Springs, which is a sort of mid-western town cleft in twain by a river, but being a mid-western town it is also ravaged by the new weather, Tornadoes. Or there is the simple and easy Zielonka, the European map that quite frankly does not have very much going on.

For those looking to play the “Oriental riff” (as it is called) in their head all the time, there is Hutan Pantai. A map that is centered around another addition, Rice. Both the typical Japanese short-grain that you think of when you think of rice, and long-grain, which you know best as Basmati which is from the Indian subcontinent. You also have Peas, Spinach, and the complete waste of time that is Green Beans. This as well as the prior additions through Farming Sim 17 and 22’s Premium and Platinum editions.

Without going too far into “here’s the new stuff, now go away so I can play more,” there are also Water Buffalo, and now animals have babies: The Angus calves are my favorites. Both of which of course make a difference to animal husbandry, which is a whole lesson that you’d need In itself never mind everything else. Of course, those who know about the Farming Simulator Academy know how to learn most of this, however, to access that you need to go into a submenu of the pause screen in-game, scroll to the bottom, and either scan a QR code or follow a website URL. Finding the lost treasure of Atlantis is easier than this onboarding.

In theory, Farming Simulator 25 is a very simple game that doesn’t require too much explanation, but reality can sometimes hit you hard. For example, say you want a cultivator, but you have a big field. Using a little bit of common sense you’d typically want to pick up a powerful tractor for the biggest cultivator available, but we all know common sense isn’t so common anymore. I’m not asking for a hand-holding experience, but some things seem obvious if you know farming well enough, and less so if you’re just playing a colorful little farming game while you listen to The Wurzels on repeat.

To that end, I think Farming Simulator 25 is brilliant. Not that I’ve been playing it as a “silly little farming game” but that there is so much option to your experience. If you’re someone who wants to rush through days, months, and years very quickly, you can, or you can play at a more sedate, second-screen YouTube, Instagram, and generally TV pace. Sure, we’ll trample some crops and maybe miss a bit, but there is another brilliant feature for that. Alongside AI farmhands, who’ll do the cultivating, liming, planting, fertilizing, and harvesting for you, if you’re so inclined, there is also a “steering assist.”

GPS, instead of having AI take over a majority of the “boring” work of driving up and down fields, you can do it yourself. You can do it without having to worry too much about missing a bit. Well, most of the time. There are a couple of instances where I’ve set up the steering assist, set off with cruise control active, and the very edge of some more complex fields are missed a little bit. Not by much, but that small white bit on the verges of your fields can sometimes be annoying.

That said, it is lovely to wake up early, run out to the tractor, hitch up the cultivator or planter, or whatever, put on some music, a podcast, or anything, and look out across the mist in the morning. Farming Simulator 25 isn’t perfect, the graphical fidelity isn’t going to set the standards for the next 30 years of games, but for what it is, FS25 is sometimes stunning on the highest of graphical settings. At other times, the snow disappearing in chunks, the endless supply of pedestrians popping in and out after getting too close, the AI traffic being about as intelligent as normal traffic, and some trees popping out of existence are bleh.

Farming Simulator 25 has its moments, both in gameplay and graphically as you look out across the fields. I want to complain about the lack of some machines, mostly potato toppers, but as is common we’re going to be relying on mods and GIANTS’ almost trademark levels of DLC for a couple of years, similar to SCS’ for Euro and American Truck Sim. As I’ve said, there is nothing quite like Farming Simulator: Some will make an eSport out of it, and others (myself) will slowly ponder away the hours, planting trees, tending to the animals, and farming the arable land.

If you’re a fan of the somewhat arcadey handling in places of Farming Simulator titles in the past, you’ll be right at home. The pickup truck is the most egregious; I’ve seen Formula 1 cars with less acceleration than this thing, and I’ve also barrel-rolled fewer times in them too. The tractors and other farming machinery aren’t bad for what I understand them to be, but having a pickup turn like a Tron Light Cycle with a controller is horrific. Especially with trailers, which seem fine one minute then like a Hadron Collider the next.

From what I’ve played of prior Farming Simulator titles, all the major components are there, Farming Simulator 25 is just a rather major upgrade for the most part. As I’ve said, I’ve run almost 100 hours on the highest possible graphical settings, running on a 40 series RTX, 32GB of RAM, and an i7. In particularly busy areas, such as my yard with two chicken coops, a handful of tractors, two trucks, lots of farm machinery, and a couple of things for storage, there are minor hiccups. Momentary drops to the 40s-50s, but in most areas I’ve seen a pretty solid 60 frames per second, if not a dropped frame once in a while.

On the more bug-focused end of the spectrum, I’ve seen a single crash while tabbed out and I had an AI worker doing a job. Otherwise, everything else has been mod-related, such as Extended Info in the in-game mod downloader resulting in a freezing of Farming Simulator 25 almost entirely when looking at trees. Every other mod I’ve tried: Real World Clock, some machines, and otherwise, have all been fine. No major frame issues or crashes, no problems whatsoever.

If it weren’t for the lack of machines, I’d say that Farming Simulator 25 is, and will be for some time, the most complete version. Ultimately, I don’t typically put in 100-ish hours for something I don’t like in the space of a week, I’m not Steam reviews. Farming Simulator 25 is exactly what you want out of a Farming Sim game, albeit missing one or two things that mods or updates can/should fix. Be it speed running like a sociopath or playing like a dad after a long day, Farming Simulator 25 is many hours of farming work and what raging psychopaths like me would call fun.

A PC review copy of Farming Simulator 25 was provided by GIANTS Software for this review.

Phenixx Gaming is everywhere you are. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Also, if you’d like to join the Phenixx Gaming team, check out our recruitment article for details on working with us.

Phenixx Gaming is proud to be a Humble Partner! Purchases made through our affiliate links support our writers and charity!

Farming Simulator 25

$49.99

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Building from the FS22 foundation.
• The engine upgrade is a major graphical upgrade.
• "Steering assist" massively helps in many regards.
• Many, many hours of dad sim "fun."

Cons

• Still the same handling of some non-farming machinery.
• A lack of some machinery.