Farming Simulator 25

I came into this one thinking a tractor sim was a tractor sim, but somewhere between managing water levels on a rice paddy and watching my AI worker finally nail a field boundary without getting stuck on a fence post, I lost three hours without noticing. Farming Simulator 25 is the kind of game that sneaks up on you, and if you have even a passing appreciation for big machinery and slower-paced loops, it will hook you properly. The core of what you do here is ploughing, cultivating, sowing, fertilizing, and harvesting across three distinct maps: the wide-open grain country of North America (Riverbend Springs, set in Arkansas), a Central European landscape of ponds and river fields, and the headline addition, an East Asian map built around rice paddy cultivation. Rice farming is genuinely different from the standard crop loop because you have to manage water retention in your fields before you can plant, and you need specialized equipment to do it. It is a small but meaningful shake-up. Beyond crops, the full simulation runs deep: forestry with its own logging chain, animal husbandry covering cows, goats, water buffalo, pigs, sheep, chickens, horses, and even baby animals, plus production chains that let you process harvests into sellable goods. The in-game economy rewards watching market prices and timing your sells, which scratches a management itch that pure field workers can ignore if they prefer. The game gives you total freedom on difficulty, too. You can start with full funds and tool around in creative mode or grind up from contracts on a near-empty farm. Now, a few honest caveats. This is an incremental step over Farming Simulator 22, not a ground-up reinvention. Veterans of the previous entry will recognize the DNA immediately, and some critics fairly noted that several additions (goats, new crops, minor mechanics tweaks) could have shipped as paid DLC for the older game. The modding community around FS22 remains very active, which is both a compliment to the series and a caveat about perceived value. The tutorial gets you to the starting line but not much further, and the gap between that tutorial and actually feeling comfortable with production chains, contracts, and field calendars is real. First-timers are best served jumping into a co-op session with someone who already knows the loop, because the game does not hold your hand once it hands you the keys. Early reviews also flagged bugs and some UI friction at launch, though post-launch patches have been steady, and the Steam community sentiment has stabilized well into Very Positive territory. For the multiplayer crowd specifically: up to 16 players can share a farm online and split tasks between them, which is where the game genuinely shines in a different direction. Handing off harvesting duties to one friend while another runs the grain trailers and a third sorts out the animal pens creates a satisfying division of labour. It is not split-screen local co-op, so your couch four-player scenario needs four PCs or consoles, but the online session is low-friction to join. Controller support is solid for relaxed play. If you want the full immersive setup, dedicated farming peripherals from Thrustmaster and Hori work natively, though I would only recommend that investment after you have already sunk serious hours in. Bottom line for the sports-and-sim crowd I usually speak to: this is the closest gaming gets to motorsport without engines screaming. The vehicle roster, over 400 machines from more than 150 real-world brands including Case IH, Fendt, CLAAS, John Deere, Kubota, and Massey Ferguson, is its own kind of collector appeal. If Gran Turismo scratches your licensed-hardware itch on the track, FS25 does the same thing in a muddy field.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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