- A realistic farming game
- Lots of vehicles to move around
- Vroom vroom
Now, I do not play many realistic farming simulators. I tend to be more of a Stardew Valley type, where I don't need to pay attention to the finer details or really even do much beyond watering my crops each day and purchasing new seeds. Farming Simulator 26 shoots for realism, with a bunch of different machines and needs for the crops - though you can hire out anything that feels too cumbersome.
Farming Simulator 26 has a bunch of farming challenges along with two new maps, over 100 machines, lots of crops, and just a lot to do! At the same time, you can take on these challenges yourself at your own pace, without having a huge rush beyond the time at the top of the screen. It's a lovely experience for those looking to farm in depth on their mobile device.
To help guide you on your farming, there are weekly and seasonal challenges, giving you specific tasks like sowing or harvesting, but also bigger tasks like delivering wheat to a grain mill so flour can be made for the town. These sorts of things link what you are growing with how they would be processed for production - it's a nice touch. You do need to manage your money and your petrol, which is often used to move your vehicles around.
A lot of the actual gameplay in Farming Simulator 26 uses the various vehicles (some of which have name brands on them like John Deere and Case), and there are a ton of crops to grow. You might need to use different vehicles that then switch what they can do through the attachments on the back, which are spread out around the farm. Sometimes you need to till the land before you plant, or you'll need a different vehicle to do some harvesting. The movement of these machines is interesting on mobile.
On one side of the screen, you have a slider that steers left or right, and on the other side, there's an up and down slider that moves you forward or backwards. You need to use these to navigate the vehicle (and often attachments) around your farmland to wherever you need to go.
It's not all just growing and harvesting crops in Farming Simulator 26 either. You can also do logging, if you want some destruction for products, or have a bunch of animals like cows, sheep, and chickens to look after.
The movement itself does feel good once you have got used to it. I find there to be a lot to do in Farming Simulator 26, and it feels like everything is quite realistic and in-depth.
Farming Simulator 26 review - "Realistic tractor simulation"
Farming Simulator 26 is an interesting, realistic farming game where you need to use your vehicles to maintain your land, growing crops for a town.
Jupiter Hadley
Jupiter is a prolific indie game journalist with a focus on smaller indie gems. She covers thousands of game jams and indie games on her YouTube channel, letting every game have a moment in the spotlight. She runs indiegamejams.com, a calendar of all of the game jams going on in the world, and judges many jams and events. You can find her on Twitter as @Jupiter_Hadley