There’s enough here for anyone interested in modern farm life to invest in and get hooked. Ultimately, these shortcomings would be forgivable given Pure Farming’s complexity. A lot of work clearly went into the design of the hundreds of vehicles and tow attachments this game contains. I was particularly impressed with the vehicles-how the blades of my field-cultivator spin along the dirt, how the wheeled rails of the seeder bounce as I pull it through my freshly plowed field. Though textures and character models are plain and cheap looking, many of the environmental effects and animations are impressively detailed. The rest of the world’s aesthetics, however, are far more convincing. While the map’s Microsoft Paint-level quality can be forgiven, the battered mannequin that is supposed to pass off as my avatar is hard to look at for extended periods. Pure Farming 2018’s visual appeal has its peaks and valleys, too. By the time I was a rabbit-breeding entrepreneur over a dozen hours in, I had gotten used to circumventing the game’s occasional bugs and oversights, but they were always there, threatening to lodge my tractor on top of a rock, rendering it incapacitated and useless. Often, when working on a task, the game failed to delineate whether I had completed enough of a task (like harvesting and processing wheat) to continue on to the next objective. ( Pure Farming 2018 also lacks any autosaving features, so starting whole tasks over became a frequent hurdle.) Other annoyances pervade the game’s UI, like disappearing waypoints or a complete lack thereof, but these were minor hiccups compared to the often-misleading objective descriptions. My initial attempt at playing through the tutorial was thwarted by one of these unfortunate encounters, forcing me to start again from the start and simply hope it would work the next time. The player is regularly expected to place equipment in a specific area for task completion, but this would simply fail to trigger in many instances. Occasionally, the game’s technical problems got in the way of my chores and management. I was eventually asking myself what the point of all this was if the core game was no fun to play. But all of this exists only in menus on my avatar’s tablet. Like most business-focused simulators, Pure Farming 2018 succeeded in getting me to push for finances, keeping my farm’s profits in the black. I eventually had a pretty impressive business selling livestock and different crops, based on what was in demand on the in-game stock market. This freed me up to invest more of my efforts to optimizing my farm and making new investments. After paying off my debts and turning a profit, I was able to pay workers to do the heavy lifting for me. Pure Farming 2018’s late-game became a bit more interesting once I bought into the mundanity. But after I’d made my plans, plotted my crop fields, accepted my tasks, and prepared my equipment, it all comes down to driving through a field or to and from a buyer until a progress meter fills-and it’s always a long, slow, boring drive. The game offers a wide variety of optional activities, like side jobs working for other farmers on the map (NPCs) and an extensive map-based challenges list for working around obstacles like pest infestation or seasonal crops demand, and they all have interesting economic and systemic applications. Once I understood what was expected of me, completing a job became an inevitability, hinging only on my willingness to drive back and forth from points A to B a dozen times at ten miles an hour. Most games are about this, but Pure Farming 2018’s tasks lack conflict.
Sowing the fields, running errands for other farmers, harvesting and delivering goods, spraying pear trees with pesticide, and every other task in this game is always reduced to repeating actions until you’ve reached 100% completion. It’s an unnecessarily obtuse start to an already intimidating game, but I was soon plowing and sowing away with near-ease.īut the chores you complete with these toys all add up to progress meters.
Every vehicle and towed attachment has a unique set of functions, of which the controls sometimes varied unjustifiably most boiled down to similar driving and action controls, yet I had to memorize different complicated button mappings for each vehicle. There are seeders, conditioners, plows, harvesters, irrigators-the number of different types of farm equipment is baffling, and there’s always a better (more expensive) version waiting for you to purchase in the shop (in-game currency only).
The foreground experience of Pure Farming 2018’s early-game consists of a lot of vehicle-based crop management the plowing, sowing, irrigating, harvesting, and selling of crops took up the majority of my first 15-20 hours of playtime.