New players may be flummoxed by the tutorial, as well as the deep, open-ended gameplay. Everything looks a lot better, there are new crops, and the new production chain mechanic and changing seasons really mix things up. Players of earlier Farming Simulator games will notice and appreciate a lot changes and improvements in the new release. If keeping the operation going is too much to handle alone, you can split the work between up to six co-op buddies. Expect to spend dozens of hours learning the ropes. But it takes patience, tolerance for bugs and sometimes weird controls, and time. Seeing your humble homestead grow into multiple thriving farms is exciting and rewarding. If you don’t want to mess with driving, you can press a button and assign the job to a worker. There’s a very large number of branded toys to play with. When you do get behind the wheel of a big harvester or tractor, though, it’s as fun as you’d imagine. We said that Farming Simulator 22 wasn’t about big trucks. The equipment looks fantastic, but human models fare less well, reminding us this is a game about machines, not people. The dynamic clouds and weather add another touch of realism, aided by subtle audio effects and music. Overall, the game’s environments look good. There’s also a pretty basic character creator, too. Jumping into Farm Simulator 22, you have a choice of three difficulties as well as three starting farms, which are modeled after the rural American mid-west, France, and Germany. There are tools for customizing just about everything. It gives the player a lot of choice about every aspect of farm life, from the color of outbuildings to the slope of the land. Farming Simulator 22 does a great job of conveying this. Running real farms consists of intense micro-management, constant decision making, and a lot of hard work. The biggest silo of information is on the game’s official website. New players should plan on spending plenty of time watching YouTube or reading third-party guides. Helpfully, there is an encyclopedia hidden away in the menu. Not easy, mind you, just less overwhelming. Struggle through the tutorial, though, and things get a little easier. It’s easy, for example, to press the wrong button and watch some important tip disappear. The tutorial is pretty bad, not made any easier by a DualSense control scheme that is awkward and unintuitive. I suspect that the developer assumes that the majority of Farming Simulator 22’s audience has played prior games in the series. The problem is, it’s hard to know what settings to mess with until you understand the game. Farm Simulator 22 has a lot of options to help make the experience easier.
Your farm can exist in perpetual spring, summer, winter or fall without impacting other elements of the cycle. However, should this level of planning be too much to handle, you can toggle the seasons off. You can make things easier or more difficult by deciding how many game days each month is. You have to plant some seeds at specific times of year, harvest at others. Part of the game’s strategy is linked to the new changing season’s mechanic.