Forestry 2017: The Simulator Review

Trees are smug bastards aren't they? Sitting there with their leaves and their phloems, photosynthesising all over the place; it's enough to make you sick. They never have jobs, they never pay rent, and have you ever tried asking one of them to lend you money? It just doesn't happen. Sometimes, I just feel like cutting them down from their lofty heights, removing their limbs and chopping them into smaller pieces. Luckily, Forestry 2017: The Simulator allows me to do just that.

The game is a collaboration between Joindots and Silentfuture, two German indie developers (because simulator developers are always German for some reason), both making their first foray into the genre. Now, despite their relative inexperience in the field, both companies were keen to make a detailed and realistic simulator that was, above all else, fun to play. Sadly, they failed on all counts.

It's hard to know where to begin in deconstructing this abomination of a game. The PS2 era graphics are probably a good start though. Blocky, low resolution and complete with horrendous pop up and more tearing than the Durex reject pile, they belie the game's proud 2017 billing. Incidentally, that 2017 tag makes more sense for this PS4 version, released at the end of 2016; it made far less sense for the original PC release in March.

You play as an unnamed generic lumberjack, complete with beard and the obligatory checked shirt. Your task, should you be crazy enough to accept it, is to cut down trees, in case you hadn't already guessed that. You start off armed with a horse and a chainsaw, and thus begins your journey to fell foliage and sell it for money.

Cutting down trees consists of pulling out your chainsaw, turning it sideways, and then cutting in a perfectly straight line at the exact point the game tells you to cut. Cutting anywhere else will make the animation of wood being cut, but the tree stays fully erect. Once you have a tree down, you can drag it to a number of dedicated drop off points using your horse, whereupon it will magically disappear, like wood is wont to do. Sometimes, the whole tree will be too heavy for your horse to drag, in these cases you can cut it into smaller pieces. This has the unexpected side effect of making all the branches on the tree vanish into thin air. Are you spotting a recurring theme here?

As the game progresses, you can buy tractors with crane arms to drag wood around, but to be honest, it's so fiddly, it's easier just to stick with the horse. Also, with the horse, you get the hilariously bad animation of your character walking along next to the horse. It's not too bad when walking forwards, but rotate and there is literally no animation, you just hover in a circle. Even more peculiar is the fact that sometimes when you walk next to a building, your character randomly appears on the roof. The horse is not confused by this, he’s probably tired of the lumberjack’s shit already and nothing phases him any more. This is even before night falls and you try to get out a torch. Spoiler: it's not worth bothering, the point of light is tiny and wobbles about or disappears as you move. It's like trying to light the house with your mobile phone when you get back in late and don't want to wake your partner.

There's a staff mechanic in the game too. You can hire staff and assign them to cutting down trees and reforesting. Apparently the staff that you hire are completely invisible, and the trees they cut and plant are too, as they don't actually appear anywhere in the game, you just see the fruits of their magical transparent labour appear in the inventory screen. This does mean that you don't have to actually cut down trees yourself, you can just leave minions to do it, meaning that you don't technically have to actually "play" the game. This is a good thing, as it means you can do something more interesting instead like watching the kettle boil, then pouring the boiling water into your face so you have an excuse to go to the hospital rather than play this game any more.

There are stacks of logs and cut timber all around the in-game woodyard, but as you've probably guessed, these are all for decoration and aren't related to your stocks of wood at all. They do help to make the game world seem larger than it actually is, which is a cheap trick, but it works well for a few minutes, making it seem like there will be loads to do. the reality is that you cut down trees, then you cut down more trees. Eventually, you'll be able to make planks and sawdust and the like, even chairs. But you won't be actively crafting these, you'll just be going into a menu and ordering them, they're just spreadsheet numbers as far as the game is concerned.

With all the invisible and disappearing objects, I'm not entirely certain that this isn't some kind of elaborate sci-fi based game in disguise. It may well turn out that the game is set in some kind of rift in the space-time continuum where different universes phase in and out of each other, and you're actually collecting the wood to repair your spaceship so you can go and fix everything. It's possible that's the case, I can't tell however due to the lack of any kind of instruction manual, tutorial, storyline or even a hint system that does much more than say; "look: this is a horse, this is a car, this is a tree" like a book for preschoolers.

All the time you're playing, there's a loop of irritating music playing. Interestingly, this changes every time you get your chainsaw out, cycling between four or five other crappy loops of generic soft rock, because reasons. It's largely irrelevant as all of the music is irritating and crap, so you'll probably mute it after about five minutes anyway, but I thought that was something interesting to note.

Perhaps the lack of features, collision detection, animation, depth, gameplay, fun or anything that actually resembles a game would be excusable if this were an early access title or a really cheap budget game. That's not the case though, the cheeky buggers have the sheer audacity to be charging 35 quid for this game! It's astonishingly poor value for a title that barely works and isn't any fun at all. I wood recommend striking this one off your chopping list, it's just not worth the axing price.