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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back.
Expeditions was provided by Focus Entertainment for review. Thank you!
This game was tested with a Steam Deck LCD. OLED testing is coming soon.
I was so excited when I got the news that I'd be reviewing Expeditions: A MudRunner Game. Having been a pretty big fan of SnowRunner (the previous game in the series), especially in the co-op mode, I couldn't wait to see what this next installment had to offer! Expeditions is a little bit of a departure from what you might be used to with the MudRunner series, but don't worry, the core gameplay is still there and as enjoyable as ever.
Expeditions is a little bit of a departure from this standard. Instead of putting you aimlessly on a map, it is more "mission-based.". Before spawning into the game world, you will select a mission, select the truck and equipment you wish to take with you and spawn into the world. You also own all the trucks from the get-go, with some options to upgrade them. These missions can take around 10-15 minutes, as opposed to the potentially hours-long open-world quests from the older games, which fans have a mixed response about.
The game is split into 3 regions, which themselves are then split into 4, making 12 maps present in the base game, each of which has around 6-8 missions. This doesn't remove all the exploration aspects; you'll still be able to drive around the map inside a mission and discover points of interest. A free-roam mode is also available once you've finished some missions on that specific map.
It's worth noting that if you do want a more "realistic" experience, you can disable waypoint and objective marker visibility, meaning you're reliant on the in-game map and manual pathfinding to get to locations, much more akin to SnowRunner and MudRunner.
But then there's the flip side of the coin. MudRunner and Spintires, before it established itself as a "simulation" series, focused on brutal and arduous journeys that took their toll on the vehicles and drivers alike. Some fans felt that SnowRunner took it easy on players, and those fans will likely find that Expeditions takes it a step further. In my experience, there isn't much 'challenge' to be had; getting stuck in the mud is rare here, you have more equipment to help you out of situations, and journeys are much shorter due to the smaller map sizes.
There is now far more equipment you can equip your vehicle. Likely because you already own all the vehicles in the game from the start, Expeditions instead adds more customization, allowing you to modify your vehicles to serve different purposes. For instance, there are Jack Screws, which can right a flipped vehicle. And Anchors, which can provide winch points for stuck vehicles. You can also carry repair kits, spare wheels, and extra fuel in your vehicle with you.
Every vehicle now has inventory and device slots, defining how much and what they can carry, and upgrades can expand this amount by providing more cargo space or adding additional mounts. This feels like a core gameplay element that is pushed in Expeditions. The developers want you to feel like you are designing a "loadout" for each mission, deciding what equipment you'll need for the job, what vehicle can carry that equipment, and dealing with the terrain you'll be facing. And for the most part, that works just fine.
Speaking of devices, you now have a few handy tools on your vehicles, including the ever-faithful winch. You now also have a sensor that can detect water depth so you don't drive into a "puddle" that suddenly becomes a lake, as well as a drone which you can fly around within 75 meters or so of your vehicle and effectively "free cam" the area, allowing you to plot a route through a particularly rough area, or just find where you need to go.
Is Expeditions truly a "MudRunner" game? It shares many things in common, such as how vehicles drive, and how they react to the terrain, but this very much feels like MudRunner "Lite". I'll be honest: most of my time playing was accepting a mission, doing the mission by simply following waypoints, and having no idea why I was doing the mission in the first place. There are a few lines of text before each mission detailing some basic story, but it's essentially all throw-away stuff and doesn't make you feel like there's much meaning or purpose to what you are doing in the game.
I enjoy driving my truck around, but I think it will struggle to keep me entertained as long as SnowRunner did, especially as I can't see the Cooperative mode being nearly as good on smaller maps with enforced missions. And as a side note, Cooperative play isn't in the game at launch; it's being added to a free post-launch update a few months later.
Expeditions gets off to a good start on the Steam Deck. The game defaults to the Steam Deck's native 1280x800 resolution with full controller support for menus and gameplay. The UI is also scaled well, and although there's no option to change the UI scale, I didn't particularly feel the need to either.
The game also offers a wide range of graphical settings. There's no support for any upscaling tech like DLSS or FSR here, and in a slow-paced game like this, you would think it would work well with it. Early on in the game, it appears as though we can pretty much run ultra settings, and in some maps, such as Arizona, where the map is largely desert and rocks, you can. However, if you move to the Carpathian map, the performance will quickly fall apart on Ultra settings, and therefore, I can't recommend any presets using them.
There is no way of running the game at 60 FPS, even with the lowest settings. It seems like the CPU struggles to reach more than the mid-50s, but fortunately, the advantage 60 FPS gives over 40 FPS in such a slow-paced game is minimal, so I probably wouldn't recommend playing these games at 60 FPS on a handheld anyway.
The graphical settings are effectively split into 2 sections, and both presets use the same settings for the first half, so here are the settings I used for reference. I disabled Anti-Aliasing, FXAA, Motion Blur, and Film Grain. Disabling Motion Blur and Film Grain is a personal preference. I don't believe they affect the frame rate, but I dislike their effects and have them disabled.
In your SteamOS settings, set a 40 FPS/Hz limit and your TDP limit to 12W.
Here, we're using mostly Medium settings. However, we can get away with turning Effects and Texture quality to Ultra, as they barely impact performance, and we also have a fair amount of RAM/VRAM that's unused. We're sacrificing volume fog and light shafts, as they can affect performance at certain times of day and in weather conditions.
Using these settings, we get a fairly consistent 40 FPS. The worst dip I ever saw was in a Carpathian expedition where you enter a swampy area, upon entering the water in the middle of a forest, I saw a dip to 37-38 FPS, however, it was very specific to the area, and it was the only time I saw these dips. You might also experience dips when flying the drone around the map, as it's quite a departure from how the game is usually played. I haven't based my presets around performance when using the drone, just when driving normally.
Battery drain is around 16-18W for most of the time when driving. However, it can reach 20W in very intensive areas, specifically where I saw the frame drop to the high 30s. You can expect around 2 hours of battery from a full charge at these settings. Temperatures are reasonably modest, holding around 70-75C in my experience.
In your SteamOS settings, set a 30 FPS / 60 Hz limit and your TDP limit to 7W.
We're running settings similar to the 40 FPS preset above, mostly medium. The exception is that we are lowering Shadow Quality from Medium to Low. It's by far the most intensive setting in the game, and we save a good 5 FPS by lowering it. We still maintain some shadows, though, as even "Low" doesn't disable them entirely. Many other settings have minimal impact on performance, and we might as well keep them set to higher settings.
The framerate with these settings is a pretty steady 30 FPS. Like the 40 FPS preset, you're likely to see a completely stable 30 FPS in the Arizona environment due to the lack of foliage and often water there. You may see occasional dropped frames in the Carpathians, but in my experience, you can expect 30 FPS almost the entire time.
The battery drain in these settings is around 12-13W, meaning we should expect just under 3 hours of battery life here. Temperatures are a little lower here, meaning your Deck shouldn't get too hot to the touch.
While battery life is always nice to have, given the mission-based layout of Expeditions compared to its predecessors, I feel like battery life is much less important in this game, as missions rarely take more than 30 minutes to complete. You can also quit out of a mission at any point. When you reload your saved game, you will return exactly where you left your vehicle in the mission, meaning you don't need to worry about finishing a mission before your battery expires.
Now for accessibility... well... there isn't any. But I'm not sure there needs to be. There are rebindable controls, and that's about all I could find.
There isn't any requirement in Expeditions to be able to hear anything; all objectives are displayed on-screen, and any "lore" or mission updates are conveyed via a written radio message displayed at the side of your screen. All info is conveyed via symbols, so those with colorblindness shouldn't struggle here.
Is Expeditions a good game? Yes, I would be hard-pressed to say the game is "bad" in any particular way. The driving physics is as good as ever, the vehicles are varied and suitable for different terrains and mission types, and the visuals hold up, with the Steam Deck running the game well, both in terms of performance and in terms of controls.
Whether or not long-time fans of the MudRunner series will enjoy the game is a different matter. Gone is the open world, replaced by smaller, mission-based adventures. You won't be handling cranes, lifting logs, or other materials onto the back of trucks; they're all handled via menus now. It gives "Spin-Off" vibes rather than a mainline series entry.
If you were in it to navigate difficult terrain and watch your vehicle react to different stressful situations, Expeditions still has that for you. Still, if you wanted to haul cargo and spend 10 minutes trying to get yourself up that muddy hill, that isn't the aim here.
I am also slightly worried about when co-op hits Expeditions. In SnowRunner, players could easily separate and do their own thing. With several missions present on each map, each player could focus on their mission and help each other out when required. There is only ever 1 mission at a time, and right now, they're all designed for 1 player. Having 4 players would be a waste. I can only hope that when the co-op update does hit, a set of separate missions is available specifically designed for multiplayer.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back.
