I’ve written hundreds of reviews, previews, and retrospectives during my twenty-odd years as a games inspector. As many of these appeared in the British version of PC Gamer magazine and nowhere else, now and again something from my archive may appear as one of THC’s daily posts. Below the jump you’ll find a short caveat emptor aimed at prospective purchasers of Agricultural Simulator: Historical Farming, a 2012 tractor sim heavily caked in nostalgia.
Purchase this charming celebration/searing indictment of 1950s agriculture and you risk ending up like me – an aggrieved agriculturalist angrily haranguing make-believe corn.
Though premise-wise Agricultural Simulator Historical Farming 2012 has a lot in common with Giants’ likeable Farming Simulator series, a handful of crucial differences render it far more harrowing. For starters, this is a much slower game than its Swiss rival. Crops can take hours to reach maturity, fields eternities to plough, fertilise, drill and harvest. The tiny hoppers and narrow spans of the antique implements would be far less of an issue had the devs provided AI farmhands, or semi-established starter farms.
What almost redeems Agri Sim is the atmosphere of its twin venues (Tuscany and the Alps), the shapeliness of its vintage steeds, and the physicality of its activities.
Earnings from arable yields, livestock rearing and milk production can be spent on a range of 19 machines that includes 5 strikingly handsome period tractors. Hooked up to ploughs that actually bust polygonal sod rather than just paint new textures on it, there are moments when the tractoring is actually rather satisfying.
Sadly, the unevenness of the ground surfaces is mirrored by the unevenness of the coding. Crashes and physics spasms have prematurely ended at least half of my sessions. I love the fact that I must dismount from my steel plough-horse to manually load a seed-drill, or hurl bales into the back of a cart, but if the price of such tactility is regularly losing an hour’s worth of painfully slow corn growth, then frankly I’ll stick with the sturdier and swifter Farming Simulator.
I remember getting this in a bundle and trying to play the multiplayer component with a friend. The already glitchy physics did not react well to two humans interacting with objects. Bouncing tractors, tools and farm animals all over the place. Unplayable but very entertaining for an hour.
Without dissing modern farmyard machinery, these tiny legacy workhorses have a dignified simplicity that really appeals.
Engine. Big wheels to give traction. No fuss, no nonsense, just get the job done.
I know, it’s a false nostalgia (I’ve never driven a tractor of any era, let alone put the graft in to grow crops), and modern kit does so much more so much more easily, but there’s a weird emotional factor at play.