I love Farming Simulator 15. I love it so much I put it on my 2015 XONE Top 10 list and even sneaked it onto a Best Xbox One RPGs list I did for About.com as well. But I want more stuff to do. Bigger.
Better. Different equipment. Someone please give me more virtual farming! I was optimistic that Professional Farmer
2017 would scratch that itch but, sadly, it just isn’t up to the task. Long load times, clunky gameplay, and a lack
of common sense quality-of-life features to make the game actually fun to play
doom Professional Farmer 2017 almost immediately. Find out all of the details here in our full review.Game Details
- Publisher: United Independent Entertainment
- Developer: VIS Visual Imagination Software
- ESRB Rating: “E” for Everyone
- Genre: Simulation
- Pros: Music
- Cons: Load times; clunky gameplay; exceedingly tedious and boring; common sense features absent
- MSRP: $40
It isn’t usually kosher to directly compare games in a
review, but when the flaws of one stand out in such contrast to the other it is
hard not to. As you can probably guess,
in this case I’m talking about Farming Simulator 15 and Professional Farmer
2017. I look at them this way - People on the outside just assume Farming Simulator is slow and
boring and clunky and dumb, but the reality is that it has a lot of really
smart mechanics to make it fun and playable.
On the other hand, Professional Farmer 2017 actually is just slow and
boring and clunky and dumb without any of the clever design decisions to make
it an actual fun videogame for humans.
The reason why Farming Simulator 15 is fun and playable is because, while it is a simulation, it isn’t super rigid about it. You can instantly teleport to all of your equipment. You can instantly hire A.I. workers to do all of the boring stuff (and everything else, too) and aren’t penalized for doing so. You can buy and sell equipment right from the menu. Your fields are right next to your farm. It all makes sense from a videogame standpoint to make the game fun.
By contrast, Professional Farmer 2017 makes doing pretty
much everything much harder than it should be.
You can teleport to your other equipment, but have to go through clunky
menus (and long load times) to do it.
And you can hire workers but, again, you have to go through the awful
menus and they don’t even show up onscreen!
Your field just magically gets plowed after a set period of time. Buying equipment requires you to actually go
to the store in town. And, for some
weird reason (maybe it is normal in Europe?), your farm with all of your
equipment is a mile away from the fields so you have to slowly and tediously
drive back and forth to do anything. On
top of that, going from your farm to the fields or to town greets you with long
annoying load times.
I understand that a lot of these things were done to make Professional Farmer 2017 technically more realistic than Farming Simulator, but some concessions
have to be made in order to make the game actually fun to play. Running out of gas constantly is a pain in
the butt. Having to plow, then grub,
then spray, then plant every field is a pain in the butt. Having to drive for miles back and forth to
fetch equipment is a pain in the butt.
Crops also take several in-game months to grow, which is absolutely
ridiculous. Doing anything with the
animal aspect of the game – cows, pigs, chickens – is a huge pain in the
butt. You can just go on and on
here. Nothing is streamlined to make it
fun. It just feels like work.
What really fouls the experience of Professional Farmer
2017, however, is that the gameplay itself just isn’t very good. None of the equipment feels very good to
drive and hooking up trailers and other implements is clunky and haphazard at
best. Also, as strictly as the game
adheres to realism elsewhere, it has no problem letting you plow your field or
plant seeds or harvest the crop at unrealistically high speeds.
I guess that was a concession to try to make the game a little quicker
and more fun, but it makes no sense.
Likewise, the game isn’t strict about actually evenly and accurately
plowing and planting every inch of your field and instead just gives you a very
generous completion percentage. You can
do loop-de-loops with your plow and leave big sections untouched, but once the
counter hits 100% the field is good to go for the next step. That’s just weird!
At least the presentation is mostly okay in Professional
farmer 2017. The menus are pretty poor,
but the in-game graphics are solid enough.
The equipment looks decent – though most of it isn’t officially
licensed – and the fields and crops look good.
The dirt also looks like real dirt, which is something Farming Simulator
can’t really say. On the other hand,
however, the lighting is pretty awful.
The lights and beacons on your equipment are like stupidly bright tiny
suns that look terrible and blow the contrast out of everything around
them. The sound is exactly what you’d
expect – lots of equipment noises – but the game also has some decent music while
you work, which I dig.
Professional Farmer 2017 is just full of weird design
decisions that sap all of the fun out of the game. Don’t get me wrong, Farming Simulator 15 has
its own set of issues and nitpicks, but it is a master class in expert game
design compared to Professional Farmer 2017.
All of that, plus the severe lack of content – one map, only a small
selection of different equipment – compared to the competition, makes the $40
asking price here just kind of ridiculous.
In a vacuum Professional Farmer 2017 might not seem so bad, but in
direct comparison to its closest competition it is just awful. Don’t bother.
Disclosure: A review code was provided by the publisher.
