I watched I Am Legend a few months back and I got lost in thought afterwards about what it would like to be on my own if a plague wiped out the rest of mankind and trying to be self sufficient. Apart from hoarding all the video games, Blu rays and all the technology I could get my greedy, lonesome hands on I would have to starting thinking about food. Yeah, I would start stock piling canned food and freezing allot of the rest with my warehouse full of generators but I would need fresh stuff and that means livestock and running a farm. I have an idea about how to run a farm but in no way enough to actually do it.

So luckily I got sent a copy of Farming Simulator 2009 to try out. I was actually a bit interested in doing this game because I wanted to find out the little stuff you don’t think about if you are curious about how a farm runs (yeah I heard myself say that too, I’m sure that if I didn’t have my weird “last man alive” fantasy I wouldn’t care).

To start with you get career or missions. I can’t help but think that a game that is all about farming is mislabelling its one off tutorials and challenges with the word “missions”. Fair enough you get bronze, silver or gold for doing each task in the shortest time you can but, still. Anyway after I did the tutorials (which took forever) I set about my patch o’ land and mowed it, cultivated it by turning the soil, seeded it waited for the seasons to do their thing and then, bang… Crops.

Ok, so in career mode you start off with a small selection of not very good farming equipment and a patch of land to slave over you have inherited from someone(your sister must have gotten the IBM stock). It’s all a bit daunting to begin with and with so much stuff in front of you you’re not sure where to start. Ok, I’m gonna mow that field, good start. Then seed it with….

…Spoilt for choice, there are 4 crops to choose from in the game including barley (beer awesome), corn (sweetcorn awesome), Wheat (bread awesome) and canola(…awesome?). Seeding costs money and you have to go a certain speed around the field, no extreme tractor usage here, this is a sim ladies and gents. After a while, I confess I was getting bored going around the field dozens of times but with different equipment on the front/back of my tractor.

See, when I first got this game I was excited about the idea of running a farm, doing the chores, fixing fences and maintaining the live stock. But this is a true Farming Simulator for the year 2009. You don’t get farms that do all those things any more. They concentrate on one crop or one type of animal, two at a stretch. In this game it’s all about the agriculture and your choice of crop. I was looking forward to cows, chickens, sheep and doing everything to keep them health and cultivating crops etc.

Ok so you get to play in a sandbox environment that is basically an island with your farm taking up the majority of it. There is a farm merchant where you buy all your new stuff from provided you have had a good harvest and you get better trade in cost on old machinery if the local residents like you (so no being drunk and naked, driving your tractor into Mrs Doyets house asking her if she wants a spin on your seed sowing machine).

You can take a look around the island but I found this a passing pleasure and an unneeded distraction to the game. I would have preferred a farming game that allowed me to do or at least choose from agriculture and live stock or a mix of both. Eventual rewards are gold medals in the missions but in the career mode it’s selling and stocking crops for a good year’s growth for a healthy turnover. It can get quite tiresome game wise and I did wish for more to do but essentially the game could go on forever.

Graphics wise its ok. The scenery is clean but the crops and some of the environment does suffer from pop-up in detail but this may be manageable by the settings in the game. I had it at its highest performance but I’m confident that my Dual SLI 8800’s and my quad core processor could take anything it wanted to throw at me (saying that, not many have this kind of setup would be buying this game). Sounds are fairly decent in the game, no music though so you will have to source that yourself.

Was I disappointed? Yes. Could the game have offered more? Yes. But then if you’re getting a game about modern farming you know what you’re buying anyway. I will wait tentatively for the Post Zombie Apocalypse Farming Sim which not only includes agriculture and live stock but the occasional run and gun situation when a zombie harasses your chickens.  Modern agriculture farming, Sir? Look no further than Farming Simulator 2009. For that little bit more I say wait for a complete farming sim from Astragon/GIANTS software or for my Zombie Apocalypse; Hunter-Farmer. Reviewed on the PC. Cuz’ I got a brand new combine harvester, An’ I’ll give you the key!