Farming Simulator: Signature Edition Review (Switch 2)

My pigs are starving and I do not know how to feed them.

The pig feed is ready to pick up at the shop, but I don’t know where the shop is. Once I find the correct establishment, I need to figure out how to pick up the pallets of food and take them back to my emaciated swine.

Later, after I purchased a front loader and the appropriate bucket attachment, I take the feed back to my farm. Then comes another problem. How do I actually deposit it in the trough?

As a casual guest in the world of simulators, having only played Train and Euro Truck Simulator for short spells, I must admit I was a bit overwhelmed by Farming Simulator: Signature Edition.

Fans of Stardew Valley will recognise the setup straight away. Your grandfather is getting a bit long in the tooth and wants to leave you in charge of his agricultural empire. It is up to you to tend the land, reap, sow, and explore the surrounding community.

Unlike Stardew, this is not a cutesy, cosy life sim. Instead, it is a meticulously designed and realistic depiction of farming life. There is more painstaking attention to detail in a single combine harvester here than there is in most racing games.

After your grandfather takes you through a brief tutorial tour, you are free to tackle your life as a farmer in any way you desire. My immediate compulsion was towards animal husbandry, which, as mentioned, was far more complex than I imagined.

Luckily, one of the best things about these games is that there is no one way to play. The map, of which there are several to choose from, is a surprisingly biodiverse collection of land plots and population centres.

You are free to begin your career from scratch or as a mature farmer. Either way, the core loop of the game is in engaging with its many systems of commerce to earn a profit. Seasonal variation, layout, and topography vary between the maps, but everything else remains the same. You trade with the same collection of NPCs and the overwhelming contents of the in-game stores are the same regardless of career choice.

As a newcomer, I chose to start a farm from scratch. There is a guided tutorial of sorts, but it only scratches the surface of the myriad systems at play. From there, I had to look up almost every aspect of farm life. While series veterans may not find the early hours as obtuse as I did, these kinds of games would still benefit from putting information more front and centre.

That said, there is a wealth of accessibility and quality-of-life options available throughout your farming adventures. Almost every task can be completed by an AI farmhand, who will cultivate fields, deliver yields, and handle all the repeatable work that you are too rich to bother with after reaching a certain level of maturity.

These simulators can be as simple or as complex as you make them, but there are still lots of plates to spin. On any given day cycle, you'll be keeping an eye on the calendar to grow crops at the optimal time, managing your animal produce, and steadily growing your empire to make grandfather proud. Then there is the farm equipment itself, each machine having a different purpose and slight variation on how to drive and control them. Every single task in Farming Simulator requires a specific tool to undertake. The late game almost becomes a collectathon as you populate your farm with a fleet of shiny tractors and attachments.

This kind of time sink is tailor-made for Switch. The just-one-more-hour compulsion and cyclical routine feel perfect for long trips in handheld mode, or for docked couch sessions. It is exactly the sort of game that fits the platform’s strengths.

It’s a shame, then, that the optimisation of this Switch 2 port is sorely lacking in places. General image fidelity is solid between modes, but performance is wildly unpredictable. The game struggles to hold a steady 30fps in both docked and undocked modes.

Some areas, particularly your hub farm, tank the frame rate considerably. Elsewhere, there are frequent graphical glitches and bugs. For me, this involved excessive clipping into terrain and loss of vehicle control. There aren't even any Switch 2 native additions to the experience, with mouse controls sadly missing. Touchscreen is present across all functionality, which, for a game where you spend most of your time in menus, is a mercy.

Audio is sharp, particularly in the sounds of the machinery, which are as distinct as their visual rendering. If you don't want to hear the endless chug of a tractor engine, there's a selection of original music on the in-game radio. Why not listen to chip tune anthems while cutting down deadwood?

The appeal of Farming Simulator is obvious, even from the perspective of a fledgling land tiller like myself. However, the uneven technical presentation will ultimately compromise anyone willing to sink a few hundred hours into the experience, especially if Giants Software does not find a way to patch in some much-needed stability.