Farming Simulator 15 trailer is a breath of fresh air

You won't find a single gun, slow-motion takedown, or grizzled warrior who looks like he's just chewed a lime in this launch trailer for Giants Software's Farming Simulator 15, which releases on PC this Thursday. That automatically makes it the best launch trailer of the week, although the lovely song and bright, pastoral feel help a lot with that too. As you might have guessed, it's a game about being a farmer, which seems to involve a lot of driving heavy machinery and relatively little standing around in wellies waving a shotgun at crows. Said machinery includes ploughs, tractors and combine harvesters, plus the lumber equipment needed for this year's new woodcutting bits.

Like the last one, it's a wonderfully earnest and straightforward trailer, free of the cynicism and Inception noises that tend to congregate in these things. Giants and Focus Home say that Farming Simulator 15 "offers an immense open world, filled with details and visual effects thanks to its new graphics and physics engine. Manage your own farm: from harvesting to animal husbandry, and from the sales of fresh products to woodcutting, the benefits of your exploitation will allow you to develop, and invest in new and more powerful vehicles or tools." There's 16-player multiplayer included too.

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.