Farming Simulator 14

Farming Simulator 14 takes the trials and tribulations that come from working a farm and adapts them into a game built to satisfy the needs of mobile gamers. If you're looking for an experience like Farmville or Harvest Moon that uses the farming elements as window dressing for a social experience, prepare to temper your expectations here. For better or worse, this is a game that takes the rigors of farming seriously and takes a straight-faced approach to its subject matter.

The mundanity of Farming Simulator is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. While most developers try to go as big and over the top with their settings and characters, Farming Simulator tasks you with the ordinary and sometimes tedious tasks involved in real life farming. That makes it as much a management sim as anything else. You plant your crops, nurture them, and then sell them off, clearing out space to plant another round of crops and money you can use to buy new seeds and upgrade your equipment. It's a low stress route towards progress that values patience and a sense of consistency above trigger reflexes and puzzle solving skills. Expect to spend a lot of time waiting in this game as you count down the clock for your crops to be harvested. That's not to say that there users don't need to possess any technical prowess or their isn't a learning curve. You're going to be spending a lot of time behind the steering wheel of a tractor, and the developers have spent a lot of time making sure that driving these tractors feels authentic. Learning how to make straight lines, effectively turn, and back up can require some time. For what it's worth, the controls are responsive. Controlling a tractor is a lot more complicated than the sort of arcade controls you'd expect to find in a mobile racing game, but once you understand the basics, controlling the tractor is smooth.

Manually planting and harvesting is one major component of the game, but just as important is your resource management. Players will have to keep a close eye on their ledgers and carefully evaluate the cost of their crop choice against what they can make for them on market. As the money starts to flow in and you unlock more expansive plots of land, these fiscal decisions become even more challenging. Fortunately, there are a number of guided objectives that pop up over the course of the game and provide you with a greater sense of direction.

There's a pretty rich selection of content here. Over ten vehicles are available. All of them are real licensed brands, and they all have unique controls that force you to readjust your play style. A multiplayer component is also available, allowing you to free roam with friends.

Pros:

• An authentic representation of farming that's surprisingly fun
• Lovingly recreated real life vehicles that each have their own unique quirks

Cons:

• Slow and methodical style of play won't appeal to everyone
• Graphics lack a distinct visual identity

• Improved in-app purchase reliability