Farming Simulator 25

The short version

The most comprehensive farming sim ever made, held back by the exact same jank it's been carrying for a decade. Farming Simulator 25 is a real step up in scope and a modest one in polish — the rice paddies are lovely, the terrain finally deforms under your tyres, and the pallet physics still want you dead. For the faithful it's an easy upgrade; for everyone else it's the same acquired taste, slightly better dressed.

Story

None, and nobody's buying it for one — but the setting matters more than usual this time. FS25 adds a lush East Asian region alongside its North American and Central European maps, and the rice-paddy farming there is the headline: flooded fields, new equipment, new rhythms. What the series has instead of narrative is the slow authorship of a farm over months of real time, and on that front it delivers as it always has.

Gameplay

The loop is sacred and intact: till, plant, tend, harvest, sell, reinvest, expand. FS25 widens it to 25 crops, and the new ones occasionally change how you think — sugarcane regrows after harvest and only needs occasional attention; rice demands flooded fields and dedicated machinery; each crop has planting and harvest windows you'll get punished for ignoring, as a chunk of our canola withering mid-harvest taught us. Add forestry, animal husbandry (with baby animals now), liming for yield, and contract work for early cash, and there's a genuinely deep management game here for anyone willing to meet it halfway.

The machinery is the real star — over 400 authentic vehicles from 150-plus real brands, each modelled and animated with obsessive care, and driving them feels great. Terrain deformation is new and better than the trailers suggested: different machines carve furrows of different depths, and tyre tracks persist across the field.

Then the jank, which is the same jank. Object collision physics remain seriously flawed — loading pallets is still an exercise in rage, and getting a harvester wedged on a barn door will shatter the immersion instantly. The much-hyped weather disasters (twisters, hail) are so rare we saw one event across a full in-game year, and the promised snow never meaningfully settles. AI workers are more reliable than before but still do baffling things. And the onboarding remains actively hostile: the tutorials are thin, the UI is a maze, and newcomers are left to trial-and-error systems that badly need explaining.

Visuals & Performance

The best-looking entry yet — improved lighting, morning fog pooling in the low fields, wet tyres picking up dirt, genuinely pretty dawns over the paddies. But performance is inconsistent and graphical bugs are common enough to nag, and on Steam Deck it's playable rather than smooth. The presentation reaches for next-gen and lands on "nicer than last time."

Craft — 7.2

An enormous, lovingly-built simulation dragged down by technical debt the series refuses to pay off — the collision physics and UI are problems it has shipped, unfixed, for years. The farming itself is excellent; everything around it is a decade behind.

Hold — 8.0

This is the series' secret weapon and FS25 has it in full: it's less a game you finish than a lifestyle you leave installed. Thirty-nine hours barely scratched one region, mods extend it toward infinity, and "just one more harvest" is as dangerous a sentence as this genre produces. It holds like few things do.

The verdict

One nostril, contentedly muddy. If you already farm, upgrade without a second thought. If you're curious, wait for a sale, brace for the jank, and give it the fifteen hours it takes to click — underneath the rough edges is one of gaming's great quiet obsessions.