12.4 hours played
Written 10 years ago
Hello all,
At of this moment, I cannot recommend this game for purchase by anyone.
After spending over 6.5 hours in the game, I have identified a game-killing bug which breaks the entire profitability model of the game. Essentially there are only two selling points. One to sell logs (you don't make much money here), and one to sell boards (you make a bit more than just selling logs). When you sell boards at the board selling point, the game immediately crashes to the desktop every time. I've tested twice on two separate saves, and confirmed the crash 3 times. I'm confident it will continue to crash.
On top of that, the game's engine appears to be the same or a newer iteration of the game engine from Professional Farmer 2014. There does seem to be a lot more detail on the map compared to Pro Farmer 2014 though. It is a completely different map though, just to be clear.
Certain assett (like some buildings, etc) elements and sound effects are also identical to Professional Farmer 2014.
The overall graphics are good, but not great. There are indeed some beautiful day and night effects, but then the main vehicles that you'll be using in the game all look like toys that a 5 year old would play with. Many of the controls are also incredibly simplistic. For example, cutting down a tree requires a single right click. To pick up a log, you just take your loader and right click it once, and it pops into the loader. Take it to the trailer, right click, and bam! it's in the trailer. As such, this game is probably going to appeal more to smaller children who haven't developed their motor skills yet, or for people who want a logging experience without the complexity of other games.
As far as other bugs go, there are several places in the game where there are buildings, log piles or other objects floating in mid air. Cars constantly weave left and right like drunk drivers. Roads and streets are lazily laid out on the map. The game's engine is really just horrible. Either that or the graphics artists responsible for creating the world are just horribly lazy.
I'm running an Intel i7-5960X processor (currently intel's BEST i7 as of March 2015), 16GB of RAM, an NVidia GTX 980, and the game is installed to an SSD. Average FPS is about 50-60fps at 2560x1440p. No idea how the game performs on lesser machines, though I may do some testing on my older gaming PC.
Also, the game REQUIRES DirectX 11. If your video card is a bit older and doesn't fully support DirectX 11, then this game will never run on your PC regardless of what you do until you upgrade your video card. If you've got a laptop that doesn't support DX11, then you're pretty much entirely screwed. You'll need to buy a new laptop with a video card that supports DX11. This may or may not kill the deal for some buyers. Personally, DirectX 11 is a better engine for games, but only if you can run them.
All said, as it stands now, I cannot recommend this game. It seems to be more of the fodder that we've been fed from the likes of Playway and UIG (or in this case, UIE. Same company, same crap). If they can fix the fatal crash and fix some of the other bugs, then they game might be worth about $10 bucks, but not much more.
For a much better forestry experience, just do yourself a favor and pick up Farming Simulator 15. It has much better forestry overall than this game.
