I had the pleasure of reviewing Farming Simulator 2011, but this was no ordinary Farming Simulator 2011…oh no, this was Farming Simulator 2011 Platinum Edition. Platinum baby, because that’s just how I roll!
So lets start from the start: Installation. Installation took quite a while, I’m not really sure why, my computer ain’t that bad. You know when you are driving along a country road stuck behind a tractor doing 10-15 mph on a 60mph. Yeah the irony! I’m not sure why but it seemed to install the game minus the platinum goodness. I had to run the installer again to add the platinum content.
While waiting for the installation to finish I noticed on the box it said “New Machinery and Green Energy”. Good to know I’m helping with my carbon footprint! Perhaps it was a mistake to install the extra Platinum content right away. I fear now that I will never know how much it brought to the game since I never played it non-platinum. We learn from our mistakes.
So into the game I go, and… Oh my, that music! I felt like I was in the bar that Data and Picard use to visit in the Star Trek TNG/Sherlock Holmes holodeck type episodes, or if you are unfamiliar with that scenario, imagine an episode of Frasier. The jazz band, I can almost smell the cigar smoke and see through the haze to the brunette in the red dress on stage swaying her hips. I could stay on the title screen all day.
I delved into Career Mode. No one wants to be a part time farmer, that just doesn’t pay the bills! I start and it’s 6:15 in the morning (in game, pfft I’d never be up at that time IRL!) I was running around until I found a tractor and my first instinct was to put it in the middle of the road to block oncoming traffic, what really freaked me out was when a car did come up and there was no one in it…
Anyway Career Mode wasn’t very helpful for a first time player, so after a bit of hunting I found tutorials in the Missions section of the game. I selected the first tutorial and the game crashed. Anyway, second time lucky.
The controls were tricky to get used to and the keybinding all seemed a bit strange and unintuitive to me. When plowing I was driving too fast and managed to lose my plow thing attached to the back of my tractor.
Perhaps I’m too reckless to be a farmer. I never did make it back to career mode. The loading times were long and I felt there was no real incentives for the player.
3 haystacks out of 10