Review: Agricultural Simulator: Historical Farming 2012

Title: Agricultural Simulator: Historical Farming 2012
Platform: PC
Developer: UIG Entertainment
Publisher: UIG Entertainment
TL;DR: Hilarious farming glitchfest
Family Friendly?: Click here for more info

Agricultural Simulator: Historical Farming 2012 is among the most enjoyable games on the market today; for all the wrong reasons. If you’re the type of person who has seen every Twilight film for the abominable script and laughable acting then this is the game for you. It’s almost impossible to review because of the amount of crashes and glitches, so I’ll just share my experience of the game piece by piece. Bear this in mind though: I love this game. It’s rubbish, but I love it.

Obviously I didn’t enter into the game with high hopes, especially one set in the 50s-70s with (for some reason) “2012” on the end of the title. But the manual is pretty, and wow, what’s that? They’ve patched it already? Good work guys. And then the patch crashes my high end PC. That’s the first of a very long crash count. As I’m fiddling with the video settings there are some minor bugs but the menus are very smooth looking. So who knows, maybe this will be good.

One day this will be mine…

I start a new game in Tuscany and I’m unceremoniously dumped into the middle of a farm with no explanation of what to do or how to do it. So I tab out and read the manual. It’s at this point I realise the music is on a very short loop and is utterly unbearable. But thankfully the manual tells me how to grow corn. Obviously with a simulator there’s no real aim to the game, but I set myself the target of making a tidy profit on some corn and maybe one day I’ll be able to afford one of the wide selection of seemingly identical tractors in a preposterous multitude of colours. Thankfully I’m provided with a tractor so I click the irritatingly small icon cruise the farm and check out what we’ve got. So I’m on the tractor and a ghost opens the barn doors. Wait, no, the doors automatically open. Useful feature. I have chickens, cows, and pigs. Also I have a dog. That’s nice. Well, let’s get ploughing.

I open the menu and buy a plough. I get started and realise how shoddy the ploughing animation is. How naïve I was. The ploughing animation is probably the best in the game, but it’s still awful. It’s at this point I realise how difficult it is to plough neatly. And then I flip the tractor. It won’t right itself. I later learn that you have to exit to the menu, save, and then load the game to entice it to right itself, but this doesn’t always work. For now though it seems there’s no solution so I must exit and restart. Time to load that game from the last… oh wait…there’s no autosave.

Take two. Let’s try the other location: Alpine. I instantly flip the tractor, then no-clip through it and wedge myself between the tractor and the wall. I’m trapped. Take Three. Let’s try and plough again. Thankfully they don’t require me to line up the plough with the tractor perfectly when I attach it. So I plough a neat square and the manual informs me to cultivate next. I drive over the ploughed soil with the cultivator and nothing much happens.

Next I need to get some fertiliser for the fertilising machine. I figure that must be at the market so I head over there and see the food for sale including eggs which would make my MS Paint skills look like Van Gogh. I grab some fertiliser and put it on the machine. I later learn that manure goes into it, not fertiliser. Incidentally the manure entering the machine doesn’t always have an animation. There’s no buying menu so I assume I’ve stolen this bag of fertiliser. While driving back to the farm I hit a chicken. The tractor flips. I’m upside down, in the ground and trapped. Don’t mess with the chicken police. The game crashes again (crash count is at nine). So I exit and load from my last save. When I load I see my cultivator attacking my dog. My tractor is missing. When I find it it’s having some sort of rave, spinning wildly towards the town. I rush over there and as I get closer I see that OH MY GOD I’M ON THE TRACTOR.

I try to grab hold of the tractor and it flips me up in the air. This is more fun than the game itself. But wait, now my tractor is disassembling itself mid-air, and dragging the telephone lines with it. During lots of reloads I find giant trees sticking through the world and blocking out the sun, and upside down tractors dragging me underground while still disassembling. After catching up I need to plant seeds. To do this you approach the seeder with a bag of seeds, drop it next to it, and wait. It’s like feeding a temperamental horse. Eventually it accepts them. So I plant the seeds and the game crashes. By the end of my play time the count will be at twenty one crashes. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve started again. I’ll never know if that poor corn ever survived.

My friends arrive to experience the ridiculousness. Let’s transport pigs instead. They seem to no-clip into everything else and each other. You can see the pigs in the wagon as you drive them, but then the wagon glitches and the pigs disappear. My friend figures out how to change the camera angle. Small victories. Incidentally you hold the right mouse button to do it. Logical? Seeding puts a dark hue on the ground like manure, making the animation redundant if you already spread manure on the ground. Let’s skip a few days and let the corn grow, then I harvest it, put the grain into a wagon (this took about ten minutes), and go to sell the corn and the pigs. As far as I can tell, the townsfolk just steal your produce. Your money doesn’t seem to go up, but when you take back your goods your money goes down. I’ll never afford a red tractor at this rate.

So that’s Agricultural Simulator: Historical Farming 2012. Buy it. It deserves so many “Let’s Play” live streams.

Good stuff

• Utterly hilarious

Bad stuff

• Crashes
• Glitches
• I’m pretty sure shopkeepers steal from you

Family Focus

It’s completely family friendly, although younger kids may fail to see the funny side and just get frustrated. A word of warning: if you have kids, it may not be family friendly to play it when they’re in the house because of all the “WTFs” you’ll be screaming.

All About Dan Spicer ...

Dan does "What Dan Does", normally involving screwing over the premise of the game just to have fun. When he's not being obnoxious in video games he's doing the same when playing tabletop RPGs and Magic: The Gathering. He's currently studying philosophy in London, and trying to cook as many pancakes as humanly possible.

More Posts - Website