Being a farmer is a big job. You’ve got to water your fields, rotate your crops, and keep an eye on the market prices to make sure you’re able to pull a decent profit. If you’ve ever dreamed of trying your hand at this noble profession but don’t have hundreds of acres of land to play with, Farming Simulator 23: Nintendo Switch Edition is here to provide you with the realistic farming action that might be missing from games like Stardew Valley and Story of Seasons.
Simulator games are a tricky lot; they don’t necessarily need to have the best graphics, but they need to have a realistic feel when you’re behind the wheel of these machines. Farming Simulator 23 goes to a lot of effort to recreate farm equipment for you to ride around in. The tractors, tills, and plows all feel like something you might have been stuck behind while going down a country road. While we might not have driven them personally, most of us have seen them in action before and the vehicles in this game do a good job of replicating how they move and handle.
Unfortunately, that realism only goes so far. Farming Simulator 23: Nintendo Switch Edition suffers from some technical limitations that almost immediately put a damper on our fun. There are only two maps available for you to build your farm on, which feels like a step back from the three offered in the previous game. There are also fewer animals to raise and vehicles to purchase, making it feel slightly smaller than its predecessor. There are almost no particle effects to speak of, making it difficult to tell when it is raining, which can have big implications on how you approach your day.
It becomes very clear shortly after you load up Farming Simulator 23 that there isn’t a right or wrong way to play the game. You can focus on raising animals, growing crops, or delving into forestry to make your living, with each having its own challenges and advantages. You start with $100,000 in cash and several machines that can help get you started on your journey, whichever route you want to take.
This freedom is great and is very much in line with what we’d expect from simulator games like this. However, the tutorial doesn’t cover anything other than the very basics of the game’s controls and almost nothing about how to actually run your farm. We appreciate the effort to not hold our hands as we go through the game, but even a more in-depth exploration of how to get your fields ready for planting would be useful. Searching the help files had us scratching our heads about what the right process would be.
Once you have all your farming equipment and figure out how to use it, it is mostly a case of sitting back and letting your AI farmhands do a lot of the work. If you want to run an efficient farm, you need several fields being plowed, tilled, seeded, and harvested in the correct order at the same time, which can be a bit of a juggling act. You’ll spend most of your time in Farming Simulator 23 either making sure your staff hasn’t run out of fields to plow or that they haven’t run into each other.
This system is meant to help you keep multiple plates spinning at the same time and it does a decent job of it, but it does take a bit of the fun out of simply driving the tractors around. Simulation games are at their best when they let you get your hands dirty; driving these big machines is part of the experience and it just feels lacking here.
Even using the farmhands to automate our farm didn’t make things run smoothly for us. There are some frustrating moments along the way that make the game feel more onerous than it needs to be. For example, there isn’t an option to have your newly purchased farm equipment delivered to you. You have to head out to the depot, which might be several miles away, and drive it back yourself or use the unintuitive system to get one of your AI farmhands to drive one or both vehicles for you. This was okay when we wanted a new pickup truck to zip around town, but a forklift, which has a max speed in the glacial range, felt like it took days to get to us before we could even use it.
That same forklift highlighted one of the other issues with Farming Simulator 23. The physics in the game aren’t exactly stellar, so when we tried to load a pallet of freshly laid eggs into the back of our pickup, the game panicked and, after a brief but amusing bit of shuddering, sent the truck flying through the air and into the field next to us. We promptly panicked ourselves and crashed the forklift, sending it onto its side and rendering it unusable unless we purchased another forklift to lift it back up on its wheels again. That seemed a bridge too far so we left it lying there for the rest of our playthrough, serving as a sad testament to the state of the game's physics. And we never did manage to get those eggs to the market.
These bugs were mostly quirky and comical but made the game feel less realistic and grounded than we expected. They broke the immersion that we were hoping to get from a true farm simulation game, but it was the lack of any significant tutorial that makes Farming Simulator 23: Nintendo Switch Edition hard to recommend to anyone other than the most die-hard of farmhands. Even then, the gameplay is too hands-off to make it truly engrossing, and it's hard to imagine there's much of a market for old hands who want a watered-down mobile-friendlier version to supplement the full-fat experience.
Conclusion
There is fun to be had in Farming Simulator 23: Nintendo Switch Edition, but those who find it will need to be intimately familiar with the farming process. This version feels like a significant downgrade over the PC edition released in late 2021 and has some gameplay quirks that hinder the actual experience of running a farm. Unless you are desperate to take your farming on the go with the Switch, there are better entries in this series out there to play.
Comments (20)
How can you have performance issues with a game like this???? Ridiculous
These games are the one kind of farming sim that I have absolutely no interest in. They come out dime a dozen, have loads of knock-offs and are usually pretty middling quality.
So you can use forklifts to throw trucks around? But it isn't a 10/10? I don't understand.
I mean they're crunching a 2023 game into 10 year old hardware. Nearly every game that isn't already made for the Switch in mind is going to suffer like this from here on out.
Bugs? Wild physics? Well... Can we get Big Rigs Remastered/Remake on Switch now?
@Ooyah
With a feature like that you would think it would easily be game of the year material.
So a lot of the cons, barring performance issues, still occur in the PS5 version of the farming sim game. These games are definitely not for everyone but for those of you that like something to sit back and relax to while listening to a podcast or something after a long day of work, this is your game. Action Fortnite gamers that need constant stimulation obviously need not apply.
Why would I play this when I could just get forklift certifed
Oh wow a shoveware title with simulator in it's name is average to below average. I was really on the edge of my seat for all the new tractor models. Guess I'll have to buy a ps5 solely for this.
@Poodlestargenerica All these "X Simulator" games with the same logo font... I can't figure out if they are all somehow related or whether it's just impossible to trademark a font and the word simulator so there's just a million random shovelware companies (and a few half decent ones) who jumped on the bandwagon 15 years ago and never got off...
Where are the bachelorettes?
Such a shame they can’t just port over the bog standard PC version like they did with the original on Switch.
Huh the previous Switch game had only one map, not three!
"That seemed a bridge too far so we left it lying there for the rest of our playthrough, serving as a sad testament to the state of the game's physics."
Worth reading the review for this!
They should add a mini-game where you watch 1000s of tons of food rot in a warehouse because the food subsidy for writing it off is higher then market value.
Then you can feel like a REAL farmer.
@N64-ROX Only good one is Goat Simulator
How is there even a review for “farming simulator 23” and nothing for WH: Boltgun?
It seems quite interesting, I'll have to try it.
This is not shovelware, it's a long-running highly respected series with some truly amazing gameplay....if you play it on PC. I honestly don't know why they would even attempt to port this series to Switch. The mods really make this game fun, and the graphics/physics are top notch to keep it engrossing for hours. Clearly you're not going to get either of those from this aging hardware. In the real version, you generally don't even hire AI farmhands until you have too many fields to tend yourself. It's all about being hands-on, even doing manual contract work for other farmers.
As the commenter before me mentioned, this actually isn't shovelware. In fact, the many (many!) similar looking games on the eshop which are shovelware are in fact cheap knockoffs of this very series on PC. That same commenter also makes a great point about how you usually don't hire AI farmhands until you have too many fields to handle yourself. I almost never hire them at all, preferring to run a smaller farm so I can remain more hands on. Reviews claiming you can't do that in this game are just plain wrong.
That said, the first game these devs brought to the Switch was actually a custom port of the full version of one of their PC games. The Switch version is called "Farming Simulator Nintendo Switch Edition." That port is actually good, and well worth picking up. I have over a hundred hours into it, and could easily play many more. The next game these same devs brough to the Switch ("Farming Simulator 20") was a port of their stripped back mobile version of another PC entry in the series, and it was crap. This game is also a mobile port. It's also crap.
Unfortunately, these devs seem to have made up their minds that Switch players deserve mobile ports rather than something more akin to their first Switch entry. So they gave us a mobile port, then paid a bunch of Youtubers to play the game and try to convince us it's good. As their first entry showed, the Switch is capable of far more than this game allows. We deserve better.
If you want to play this series, buy it on PC, or buy the first game these devs brought to the Switch. Those games are terrific to relax with while listening to a podcast or watching something on TV/Youtube/etc. This entry? Not so much.
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