Farming Simulator 25

Farming Simulator 25 was provided by Giants Software for review. Thank you!

It's time for a brand new Farming Simulator! But is brand new the right word for it? Or is Farming Simulator 25 merely a small upgrade over Farming Simulator 22? It's actually a story of two halves, so let's get into it and see what this iteration of the series is all about.

As you've come to expect from the series, Farming Simulator 25 brings a collection of new vehicles for you to own. Gone are the days of Farming Simulator 15 where you only had access to a paltry collection of 140 vehicles from over 40 manufacturers. Farming Simulator 25 boasts over 400 vehicles from over 150 manufacturers. I'm not quite sure why you need this amount of selection, but maybe that's because I'm not super into the whole farming ecosystem. If you're a farmer or are at least familiar with farming equipment, you can likely find your model in Farming Simulator 25.

One of the major new additions to the Farming Simulator franchise that was touted for Farming Simulator 25 was the addition of "Asian-style" farming. Farming Simulator has historically been focused on Europe and North America for its locations, but now the franchise has expanded to include an Asian map. So is this new map worth all the fuss?

I could take or leave the new map itself. The maps and world of Farming Simulator have always been a bit of a letdown for me, and the new Asian map is no exception. Largely, the map looks like any other map when you're out in the rural areas. Only once you enter the town does the game give an "Asian" vibe, mostly due to the neon signs outside the buildings. Unfortunately, the Asian map still uses many assets from the Western maps, meaning all signs are in English, and the neon-lit streets look dead due to a lack of pedestrians and traffic.

The exact location of where Hutan Pantai (the Asian map) is based isn't made clear either. The name is Indonesian, but the traffic drives on the right, which wouldn't be the case in a place like Indonesia or Japan, which drives on the left. So, instead of focusing on a specific country, the developers just focused on a large region with many cultures and designed the map around that. This design philosophy likely made the map feel generic and not very immersive. The majority of the map could easily be set in America or Europe.

Another set of improvements touted by the developers is the visual ones. While my ability to test these on the Steam Deck is somewhat limited, as we can't run at full graphical settings, the game does look pretty nice, and there are plenty of rendering techniques on display here, such as bloom, depth of field, good quality shading and lighting, as well as ambient occlusion. This combines to create a nice-looking image where metal reflects the sun, trees provide nice shading, and dirt adorns your vehicles as they work.

Ground deformation was also mentioned as an improvement to visuals and gameplay, although I didn't particularly notice this when I played. My trucks/tractors made slight grooves in the soil, but nothing that would actually affect the gameplay in any meaningful way, and it looked more like a tire track visual effect than actual deformation of the terrain.

Farming Simulator 25 also brings in new weather effects, including disasters such as twisters and hail, which can damage your crops. I found these to be rare, however. After playing an in-game year, which is several hours of playtime, I only experienced 1 bout of snow and hail in an entire crop cycle, with probably <5% of playtime having a weather effect active. Even though the game is supposed to have settling snow and snow physics, the snow never truly settled on the ground, and the vehicles drive the same in wintry conditions as they do in summer. Overall, it's pretty disappointing.

New crops have been added, but they function the same as the other crops in the game, so getting too excited about them is hard. Likewise, baby animals have finally been added to the game, which has some impact on gameplay, but I found myself buying animals rather than trying to breed them. The time saved probably outweighs the money saved.

Aside from these aspects, it's largely "business as usual" for Farming Simulator 25. All of the features you enjoyed in Farming Simulator 22 have carried over, and it follows the same love-it-or-hate-it gameplay of... well, farming. You'll be planting and harvesting, all with that thrill of loading up your trucks with grain from your fields, then you'll be getting confused about where to sell your wheat, and then finally stumbling upon the place that's buying wheat and making 25 cents, only to rinse and repeat. You can also do all of this with up to 16 players in multiplayer.

The vehicles perform identically to Farming Simulator 22, with the same control scheme and physics. It's still a joy to manually adjust your harvesting head and switch it on/off to begin harvesting, and swing the pipe out of the side to load up a trailer truck driving beside you as you harvest. There are no changes here, but it was always a highlight, so no changes are good.

So, is Farming Simulator 25 a revolutionary improvement for the series? No, but I wasn't expecting it to be either. I will say that they don't seem to have made anything worse, which isn't always a given these days. The visuals are nicer, the game seems pretty well optimized aside from some stuttering, and you have more variety in what you can do, such as more crops to grow and additional ways to earn money, like construction projects.

You also have access to a wider variety of vehicles and tools, and they are laying the groundwork for interesting features in the next Farming Simulator, even if they aren't there yet, such as natural disasters and terrain deformation.

Would I recommend you buy Farming Simulator 25 if you already own Farming Simulator 22? Probably not, the upgrades are marginal and unless you are a hardcore Farming Simulator fan, it's probably not worth the price right now. Running Farming Simulator 22 with mods can give you a nicer experience right now, but in a year, when Farming Simulator 25 mods catch up, some patches have been introduced, and the game is on sale, it might well be worth the upgrade.

Farming Simulator 25 - Steam Deck Performance

Farming Simulator 25 covers the Steam Deck basics of having good controller support while supporting 1280x800 resolution, meaning no black borders around your screen. We also have some nice extra technologies like Intel's XeSS and AMD's FSR3.

There are many graphical options in Farming Simulator 25, but I've kept it fairly simple by choosing a preset and then modifying a couple of settings to make for a more stable experience. It should be easy for you to copy the settings yourself.

Recommended Settings - 30 FPS

Set the SteamOS frame rate limit to 60, and there's no TDP Limit for this one.

I'm using a modified version of the Medium preset, so go ahead and set your game to the Medium settings, turn VSync to Off, set your Framerate Limit to 30, set your in-game HUD Scale to 125% for easier-to-read text, then press the "X" button to open the advanced graphics menu, and adjust the following settings:

Switch SSAO down to Medium, Terrain Quality down to Low, Light Quality to Medium, Max Mirrors to 0, Post-Process Anti-Aliasing to Off, and FSR 3 to Quality. The game does have frame generation, but as our FPS is on the lower side, it introduces too much input lag to be nice to play.

These settings smooth out the Medium preset a lot, especially disabling Mirrors, as with them on, you'll get severe stutters when switching to a cockpit view.

With these settings, I got a pretty constant 30 FPS during play. Very occasionally, the FPS dropped to 28 or 29 when in one of the cities, but the game remained perfectly playable.

The power draw tends to stay around 12W-14W, but it can go as high as 16W in the towns. You can likely expect about 2.5 hours of battery life from a Steam Deck LCD and around 3.5 hours from the OLED.

Temperatures stay lower in the 60C-65C range, with slight fan noise.

Regarding Performance in Multiplayer:

Performance in multiplayer games seems considerably worse than single-player, with a much heavier load on a single CPU thread, seemingly caused by player activity when multiple players are driving. This means that you'll struggle to stay above 25 FPS in larger multiplayer games, although if you are just playing with 2-4 players, you might get away with it.

Accessibility:

Farming Simulator 25 has a few accessibility options, such as adjusting the game's economic difficulty, simplifying the crop cycle, colorblind mode, disabling what is akin to camera shake/sway, and various assists/simplifications for controlling vehicles.

Conclusion:

Farming Simulator 25 talks a big game about the new features it has over previous iterations of the series. But those changes aren't quite big enough for me to recommend that you dive in right now. Give mods some time to catch up to the level they are in Farming Simulator 22, fix a couple of collision bugs I encountered, and maybe go on a sale, and then it's worth the upgrade.

Farming Simulator 25 runs well on the Steam Deck for the most part. The controls are great, and while performance in larger multiplayer games borders on unplayable, if you play solo or with a small group, it should run just fine.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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