Pure Farming 2018 Review – Maybe Too Pure Isn’t Great

Pure Farming 2018 Review

I was excited to dive into the world of combines and plows when I fired up Pure Farming 2018. Little did I know just how “pure” it would be. I love games like Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, games that romanticize farming and the lifestyle surrounding it. But Pure Farming is a simulator, not an RPG that appropriates the farming business and that means all of the daily tasks are dedicated to glory and the betterment of your farm. If you’re looking for the purest farming experience around, look no further.

In all fairness, the game delivers the farming experience it promises. In the First Farm mode, you start with a modest amount of money and go through a tutorial that explains a lot of options you have available to you. This is the mode I spent most of my time in as I am definitely a newcomer to sims of this caliber. For a while, I was entranced by the repetitive motions of harvesting a fresh field of wheat. I found a zenlike quality in the whole ritual of attaching a harvester to a combine then unloading the grain into a trailer when the combine was full. I felt proud of my harvest and felt good about stowing it away in my silo; however, the tutorial had different plans for me. As a slave to the game, I needed to sell my hard earned grain, hauling my good across town. This is when I began to realize I was part of a cruel trick, that I was given a second job apart from my regular day job. I was no longer just tending the fields, I was navigating the roads of rural Montana (sneak peek for Farcry 5?) trying to dodge rogue street cleaners in order to dump my wheat off for some meager wages. Little did I realize the fun was just getting started.

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“…the game delivers the farming experience it promises.”

The first field you interact with is ready for harvest while all the others are useless plots of dirt until you work them. As the tutorial continued into how to work a field, I thought things might pick up a bit; dump the lame trailer for plows and seeders. The plow was the breaking point for me. When the plow is engaged, it slows down your tractor to a snail’s pace. I wouldn’t mind so much if it had a bigger footprint, but plowing an entire field took an eternity. I wasn’t feeling that zen I managed to find in harvesting. I was feeling boredom and slightly Sisyphusian because once I got the field plowed it was time to seed it. Seeding is a similarly slow process of raking a machine back and forth across a field. For me, there isn’t anything engaging about the pure mechanics of farming, especially virtually.

As much as I find the farming monotonous and tedious, Pure Farming 2018 is a decent simulation. All of the farming equipment is based on real brands so farming enthusiasts can live out their passions with near perfect accuracy. The farming locations are diverse as well, covering parts of America and Europe, accompanied by the regional crops and livestock. The development studio has already announced more fields and locations will be coming soon so there should be a healthy roster of farms to choose from.

Pure Farming 2018 is a good simulator, just not a fun game. I was hoping for something that either gamified farming or simplified some of the tedious tasks. Instead, I was given a second job that included all of the life-like tasks, including every tedious one.

*** A review code was provided by the publisher ***