Pure Farming 2018 (PC) Review

If you ever wanted something that gives you exactly what is says on the box, then you’ve picked up the right game with Pure Farming 2018, a part of the long running Farming Simulator series of games. There is some excitement to be had here, if you don’t mind putting the work in… Just like a real farm!

Name: Pure Farming 2018
Platform(s): Steam (Reviewed), PS4 & Xbox One
Publisher(s): Focus Home Interactive
Developer(s): Giants Software
Release Date: Out Now
Price: $29.99 (Steam)
Genre(s): Simulation
Mode(s): Single-player, multiplayer

When it comes to a story, you’re not going to find much with Pure Farming 2018. The basic outline of the story mode is that your Grandfather has passed on, his passion in life was farming and during your childhood, that passion was instilled in you. However your father saw no future in agriculture and took you away from those lovely summers in the country with your Grandfather. Later on, your Grandfather passed away with the farm being in huge debt. You get the farm due to an open will and decide to take it over and make the farm into the profitable and successful place it was in your childhood.

What all of the above means for Pure Farming 2018 is exactly that: Pure Farming. You’re going to be spending a lot of time out in the various fields plowing wheat, barley, rye, and many other grains and food on your way to trying to have a positive bank balance. Along the way you will learn how each vehicle works in the overall farming lifestyle, from harvesting to maintenance and cleaning. Oh yes, you are going to be spending a lot of time getting the vehicles fixed up and washed so that they can work longer and harder before you have to upgrade them piece by piece or by buying a whole new version of the vehicle. You’ll get to experience a combine harvester for a lot of the main harvesting you will do, including the different attachments that come along with the machine. You’ll also have the fun of driving a slow as all heck Tractor around pulling all different styles of trailers as you deliver things like water and gains to sellers, your own property, buyers and other farmers in the area.

And I hope you like things going sssssssssllllllllllloooooooooooowwwwwwwww in Pure Farming 2018, because the vehicles aren’t all that fast, just like the real life versions. I’m a country boy growing up, spending many weekends learning first hand how to drive a tractor long before I would ever learn to drive a car. I know how slow that life can be, but for some reason, Pure Farming 2018 makes everything feel a lot slower. Part of this is done by having adjustable time in the game, where you can choose to go for the 1:1 scale time frame where 1 minute is 1 minute in real time; or speed things up to over 24:1 where a day goes by in about 15 minutes. I know that the simulation gamers out there will love this feature, but for a casual former country boy like me who likes to get thing done quickly, this doesn’t work too well.

As for shortcuts, well Pure Farming 2018 makes sure you can’t take any. Everything needs to be done exactly how it’s meant to be. Sure, you can keep some vehicles close by so you can transfer things quicker, but don’t think you can go over that hill or around those trees to get somewhere quickly. Nope, if you try to take a shortcut, you’re going to be screwed over by some of the WORST collision detection I’ve ever seen in a game with drive-able vehicles. Anytime I tried to go near a tree, I’d find some way to get the tree stuck between the Tractor and the trailer, leaving me to abandon the game entirely thanks to the lack of an auto-save system.

Graphically, Pure Farming 2018 is a joy to behold. Having the ability to look at everything from a first person perspective as well as third person just gives you a closer look at how well those crops are doing, how dirty that vehicle is, how textured those flowers are. But that’s where it ends. The animation here is just robotic for the most part. When you’re having to wash one of your vehicles, the water effects look like something out of an early VR game, low textured and almost cartoonish in look. But given how much happens in the gameplay mechanics, I think I’ll give the graphics a pass in this one. After all, I like gameplay over graphics.

Pure Farming 2018 doesn’t really have a soundtrack to be specific. You do get a radio in all vehicles where you get some cover tracks for country and Americana style songs, but you can also add in your personal online streaming website or even a bunch of mp3 tracks to a folder to make a custom radio station. To be honest, harvesting grain to Slayer and Metallica was pretty cool. Outside of that you have the constant bird chirping sound effect that loops over and over so much that you want to kill the stupid little thing with a BB Gun. All the machines have the right style of sound effects to them when they go do their thing, so there’s nothing to fault here.

At the end of it all, Pure Farming 2018 is the exact experience that it says on the box: Pure Farming. I can’t really be upset that I wasn’t overly thrilled after playing it for over 20+ hours. sure the locations are nice, the Germany pack that came with it was a good touch, but it was still farming at the end of the day. I think that Pure Farming 2018 isn’t really suited to the casual gamer, but more the simulation enthusiast or agriculture student. Hell, there’s a controller for Pure Farming 2018 that simulates the controls for these bigger machines and I think that using that would create a damn good simulator for agriculture students to practice with, like using Pure Farming 2018 as a learning tool. But I just don’t see the appeal as a video game.

Review Disclosure Statement: Pure Farming 2018 was provided to us by 5 Star Games for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please go review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy for more info.