After reviewing Farming Sim 22 and then the mobile version, Farming Sim 23, I took a little break from farming to see if there would be some noticeable changes to the formula. Don’t get me wrong, these games are immense and I can understand the appeal, but they aren’t without their fair share of issues. I honestly think I was a bit harder on Farming Sim 22 than I should have been after playing the mobile version, and now I kind of wish I would have played Farming Sim 25 instead of Farming Sim 26. Give me a chance to explain though, because it isn’t because Farming Sim 26 is just a terrible game.

Obviously, there is always a bit of grace you need to give to a mobile version of a game, especially one as involved as this simulator. I understood why Farming Sim 23 had to make the cut backs to some of the core aspects compared to the full version. Things like full physics and certain actions just wouldn’t work as well on a phone. Clearly visuals will take a hit, I get that. However, why are things like bank loans not a thing or farm building? There are a million farm building management games out there for mobile, why isn’t this implemented.

Welcome to the farm!

So, I waited a while, skipped 25 and now jumping back in with Farming Simulator 26 to see if there has been some noticeable improvements. Maybe not fully added everything, but surely there has to be some, right? Phones have gotten stronger, I’m playing on the Nintendo Switch 2, it has to be better. Nope. Unfortunately, feature-wise, this is exactly like Farming Sim 23, with some small additions and tweaks. You still can’t take bank loans and mess with that entire economy system, which I assume is on purpose in order to push buying tokens (microtransactions) to speed up progression. You still can’t customize your farm which still baffles me or buy most attachments for equipment.

While they may not have added in the things that I wanted them to add, the more meaningful gameplay additions I was looking for, that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been improvements. The most notable is the overall crop and animal list, it is now much closer to what you get in the full version. It is still missing some of the animals like Highland Cattle, Water Buffalo, Bees, as well as some crops like Beets, Green Beans, Peas, and Spinach. That being said the list of crops and animals is more than what was there for Farming Sim 23. With the added crops there also comes added machinery to buy and use to plant and harvested said crops.

The GPS is a decent inclusion, but it still has its issues.

The other decent inclusion is the GPS system which you can activate once you get to a field, this puts you on an auto pathway in order to keep you straight while you’re doing any of the field work. Whether it is plowing, planting, fertilizing, or harvesting, it will keep you on a straight path so you don’t veer off. It’s good for long fields, kind of cumbersome for smaller ones. It won’t turn for you, so you will need to disengage, align your next straight path, and reengage. Sometimes trying to do it to fast can mess it up and it will auto track a wrong path and cause a slight annoyance.

Other inclusions are less notable like being able to go 3rd person while walking around, which is pointless and since the character models don’t look great that isn’t a mode worth being in. There is also challenge system in place, but I honestly forgot about them while focusing on my career mode. They are challenges to do specific tasks, like harvest so many acres of a crop or deliver grain to mills to make flour for a bakery. Some challenges will require you to buy certain equipment to complete though so they will need to wait.

If you don’t want to deal with the slow progress of Career Mode you can do Creative Mode where you get $250M to do whatever you want.

Farming Simulator 26 brings in contracts finally which means each season (every twenty-four hours) you can take up to three different contracts in to earn extra money. These are generally pretty simple and its basically doing work for other farmers like plowing their fields, harvesting their crops, or even delivering their goods. Be careful though, there is a broken system in here though with taking contracts to plant produce. Specifically when planting expensive produce. For example, I had a contract for $5,000 to plant potatoes in quite a large field, not too bad. I didn’t have the machine to do it so you can rent it for about $400 dollars.

The problem is, planting potatoes is expensive, and every second you run that machine it drains your cash. That is a mechanic for all planting machines, it will cost money to constantly run it and depending on what it is the price changes. The issue is, this is a contract for someone else’s field and its draining my money for their potatoes. It’s not like you can negotiate the contract amount either. After the contract was over, I ended up losing $5,000 on the contract because of how expensive it was to plant the potatoes in that field.

I do like how you have to bond and ride the horses in order to keep them healthy to sell them at a better price.

Besides that one issue with contracts, the rest are pretty simple and you will make money. The best bet is to hire someone to go do the side jobs while you work on your own field, but that’s another issue. AI workers are just dumb and slow. The routes they take when lining up their next run is quite frankly astonishing and the amount of time wasted with them moving around paths is bad. Unless you have a lot of other work to do, you’ll easily finish your own stuff before an AI worker will get anything done and then you’ll need to finish up their job also. The AI definitely needs some improvement.

Visually there has been some improvements to certain things like draw distance from what I remember, but that doesn’t mean Farming Simulator 26 is a great looking game for Switch 2. Like I said for 23, the machines are faithfully recreated and those you can tell are high quality models, but the environments are stale. The two new maps are kind of boring, the town feels dead, and the pop-in issues are still here. There is also quite a lot of times where textures just won’t even load, it was pretty crazy seeing these large blocks of smudges all over the place. It happened more than it should.

Can you at least load the textures that are right in front of me please?

I understand with mobile you can’t get rid of the pop-in issues, I get it. However, the texture load-ins are the main eyesore here. When they aren’t even transitioning to the closer LOD models something is wrong. Cockpit views are pointless as well since none of the gauges or mirrors work, it’s just ugly inside. It isn’t a terrible looking game at times, but it’s always funny pulling up to a large field and it looks like half of the crops have been harvested just because the draw distance doesn’t load in the other half of the crops. Seasons change, but really all that changes is that some of the trees will lose and gain leaves. There is no weather system so no snow or rain comes in the winter.

The only thing with sound design worth noting is what you get with the machinery. Engine sounds are fine, just of course monotonous. Each machine sounds different and for the most part each tool and will have its own sound effects while working. Animals of course have their standard sounds from clucking chickens to the mooing cows. Outside of that there is no voice over or soundtrack besides the main menu theme so if you don’t wear headphones you will just be listening to machinery the entire time.

I don’t think my mirrors and guages work properly… and is the rest of this field plowed already or just out of range?

I’ve been ragging on Farming Simulator 26 quite a bit, but it does have its merits. The same merits that the series has in general with its wide variety in farming. If you want to do forestry, or raise and ride horses to sell, or run a bakery, it’s all here and in mobile which in itself is great. It does still have that farming management simulation aspect that you’re looking for. However, for every good thing added there were still issues that popped up or things that should still be added in here. If the only thing you wanted from Farming Simulator 23 to Farming Simulator 26 was more things to do, and not really any improvements on mechanics or systems, then maybe it’s still worth the upgrade for you.

Farming Simulator 26 is available now on iOS, Android, and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2.

A copy of Farming Simulator 26 was provided by the publisher.