Farming Simulator 23

My honest first reaction to Farming Simulator 23 on Switch was curiosity quickly tempered by the fine print: this is the mobile build, not a port of the full home-console experience, and that distinction matters more than the marketing would like you to think. You pick one of two maps, choose your farming path, and start working the land through a full chain of plowing, sowing, fertilizing, and harvesting across 14 crop types, with animals, forestry, and production chains rounding out what you can spend your time on. The AI helper system lets you set workers to run machinery autonomously while you handle another task, which is genuinely useful once your operation grows. What works, and works well, is the core tactile satisfaction of watching machinery do its job. Over 100 licensed vehicles from real-world manufacturers like John Deere, CLAAS, Fendt, and Massey Ferguson are all here, and each one is modeled with enough attention to detail that hooking up a field sprayer or unloading a harvester into a waiting trailer still carries that quiet mechanical pleasure the series is known for. Production chains, new to this portable line, add a layer of economic thinking: milling wheat into flour before selling it rather than just dumping raw crops at the nearest depot. The internal market pricing system rewards patience and timing, which gives the management side a bit of genuine texture. The problems are real, though, and they are structural. Multiplayer is completely absent, a feature present in Farming Simulator 22 on PC and consoles. The vehicle roster drops from over 400 in the mainline release to roughly 130 here. Building placement is locked, meaning you cannot arrange silos or livestock pens the way you want, and economy options like loans and rent are stripped out. The two maps are functional but visually muddy, and framerate dips at inopportune moments pull you out of any zen state you were building. Touchscreen UI buttons designed for mobile persist on the Switch screen even when you are playing in docked mode, which is a small but persistent reminder that this version was designed for a different device first. For absolute newcomers, the tutorial does not hold your hand nearly enough, and the learning curve is steeper than it should be for a game this mechanically limited compared to its bigger siblings. If you already know the series and genuinely need it portable, the loop is intact and sessions in handheld mode work surprisingly well in short bursts. But if you have access to a PC or a current-gen console, Farming Simulator 22 is the fuller, more moddable, multiplayer-enabled experience that this version is quietly a lesser echo of.

Alex · Scout Team

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