That Farming Sim 19 isn’t for me is definitely not the horses’ fault, but its equines are also nowhere near interesting or beautiful enough to redeem the otherwise utterly unattractive tractor driving simulator for me. I have to conclude that despite what the Tending to Animals trailer would let one believe, I am very much not the target audience for Farming Simulator. I’d call these issues of understandability bad game design and bad tutorialization while the games’ fans refer to it as a steep learning curve. No masterpiece perhaps, but surely a relatively solid entry in the series.īut for players like myself, who are perhaps not entirely averse to difficulty in their gameplay, but don’t feel like compensating for a lack of tutorialization by intense research and time-consuming trial and error, Farming Simulator ain’t it, chief. I’ll go ahead and guess that the truth lies somewhere in the middle: I have no doubts that plenty of people enjoy the Farming Sim series and will enjoy this latest entry - the game’s Steam Reviews currently sit at 76% positive, and Metacritic lists it at a 72% critic rating and a 7.1 user rating.

I got frustrated writing this review, because my feelings are mixed on the matter: I want to complain about how unintuitive and lacking the game’s explanations are, but I’m afraid I’ll sound like I’m just too dumb to play Farming Simulator. Unfortunately, I really can’t be that person. This would be an interesting side mechanic for anyone remotely interested in the rest of the game. Unlike other animals in the game, they cannot be bred. Trained horses can then be re-sold for a profit. The actual reason why I’m feeling very “meh” about the Farming Simulator horses though, is that there is just not much to do with them.įrom the aforementioned guide, I’ve gathered that horses can be trained by riding them regularly and cleaning them afterwards. Unfortunately… Well, find out in my review. A more cynical interpretation is that the Tending to Animals trailer was a last ditch effort to make it look like Farming Sim 19 would appeal to more varied players than the series is known for.

Other trailers, such as the Farm and Furious one from November, as well as the original Gamescom reveal trailer, show a very different balance between animals and machines.Ī generous reading of this discrepancy in trailers would have been that the game is for everyone, that the player can find their own balance of industrial machinery and idyllic animal care within the gameplay. I found myself simultaneously intrigued and skeptical at this rather obvious effort on the marketing team’s behalf to make Farming Simulator 19 look like a game about riding around your farm to feed your livestock. In October, Focus Home released a Tending to Animals trailer ( Video Link | Twitter Thread), very girly, complete with a certain hipstery instagram aesthetic and cute indie music.

In the middle of Gamescom FOMO and a deep appreciation of the positive reaction my Red Dead Redemption 2 Trailer Breakdown got a few days before, I made a little shot by shot analysis of the few seconds of horse footage on Twitter. I first caught wind of FS19’s equestrian intentions when they released their initial reveal trailer at Gamescom 2018. So when you have a well-implemented and functional new entry in a long-running game series that adds horses, that has to result in a pretty solid game at least… right? Meandering Marketing Messages After all, a game series so successful had to be an essentially good game at its core, right?

It was never a series that particularly interested me as a player - but I supposed that was because the subject matter of realistic farming wasn’t particularly up my alley. The game’s original developers and Giants Software company founders Thomas Frey and Renzo Thönen were early alumni of the Game Design specialization at Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK, from which I graduated as well.įrom what I see, the Swiss indie game scene regards the series with an odd mixture of national pride at its success, a little bit of envy at the piles of money it’s raking in, and a twinge of remorse that among all the beautiful, unique and artsy games our local industry produces, it’s Farming Simulator that is by far the most widely known and financially successful. I had never played one, but the series is something of a local phenomenon: To the best of my knowledge, it is by far the most profitable video game developed in my home country of Switzerland. Before FS19 was released, I thought I had an idea of what to expect from a Farming Simulator game.

Clean tractors farming simulator 19