Farming Simulator 22

Some games get praised for being fun. Farming Simulator 22's reviewers reach for a different word more often: meditative. Reading widely through its history, that word recurs with striking consistency, and it's worth understanding both why the game earns that description and what keeps its most invested players from giving it a perfect score.

A genuinely meaningful kind of relaxation

One of the most-upvoted reviews in this game's entire history comes from a reviewer who describes becoming disabled after over 20 years as a trucker, introduced to the game by their son. It gave them, in their words, something to do that their condition otherwise took away. That's an unusually powerful data point, and it's not isolated — reviewers across very different circumstances describe similar value in the game's slow, methodical, farm-management pace, whether managing a small plot solo or a sprawling operation with friends in co-op.

The complaint that follows the whole franchise

Here's the thread that recurs with real consistency across FS22's most active years, 2021 through 2024, and it's a specific, technical complaint rather than a vague one: hired-worker AI. "Giants Software has years of experience making Farming Simulators, but apparently they still can't make an AI that can properly work on fields... FS22 AI even gets confused by perfectly rectangular fields," reads a representative 2022 review. This matters more than it might sound, because much of the appeal of scaling up a farm in this game depends on being able to delegate fieldwork reliably to hired help — when that AI behaves unpredictably, it directly undermines the large-scale management loop the game is built around.

A separate debate about the release cycle itself

Layered on top of the AI complaint is a longer-running franchise debate that FS22's veteran reviewers engage with directly: whether each biennial release, including this one, changes enough from its predecessor to justify a full-price purchase. "Yet another installment of: SAME AS LAST RELEASE," reads one representative 2022 review, while others push back directly — "This is NOT just a reskin," argues a reviewer with a decade of series history, pointing to specific new systems like production chains and seasons as real, substantive additions. This is a genuine, ongoing disagreement among the series' own most invested players rather than a settled consensus in either direction.

Reading the completion data

With 45 tracked achievements, the completion curve reflects broad, successful early engagement — core farming milestones like the first harvest sit around 50-60%, showing most buyers get comfortable with the fundamentals. The rarest achievements, tied to specific niche activities like horse riding and collectible-hunting, fall to around 1%, reflecting how much optional breadth this game offers beyond its core farming loop.

7.5 out of 10. Farming Simulator 22 succeeds at something genuinely distinctive for its genre — a slow, methodical management sim that a remarkably wide range of players describe finding real, lasting value in, occasionally in deeply personal terms. It's held below the top tier by a real, long-documented weak point in hired-worker AI that undermines exactly the large-scale automation the game is designed around, plus a fair, ongoing debate among series veterans about how much each new release actually adds. Now succeeded by Farming Simulator 25, it remains a worthwhile entry point on its own merits if you haven't already committed to the newer game.