After a decent April where Sony actually gave away 3 additional games as a gesture of goodwill to the world who is largely forced to stay at home these days, they paid us back for said generosity by really letting us down with the releases for May.
These games are very popular, but one of them is NOT a console game and the other one boggles my mind that it exists at all. I suppose this was always going to happen when you pay a mere $3 a month for a membership.
Cities: Skylines
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I was actually pretty excited about this one because I had seen Pewdiepie play it a bit on one of his daily gaming sessions. Of course he was making fun of it but it actually looked pretty cool. It has been a while since I played any sort of city-building game and had a lot of fun with Tropico. I wasn't really keen on using a gamepad to play such a game and it only took me about an hour before I really started to not like using such a method of interacting with it.
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You've got to build some pretty elaborate road schemes in this game and doing so incorrectly causes mayhem on the streets. Just like in Sim City, a poor road layout will result in failure and necessitate the tearing down of buildings, some of which are probably thriving hence the traffic.
This process becomes extremely frustrating right from the get go when playing with a controller, at least from my perspective. It seems that no matter how much I am concentrating on getting my road just so, a just slight overpress results in my road spanning over to the next county and some sort of error message.
If you are the kind of person that possesses this level of thumb dexterity then I tip my hat to you and wish you the best in your future career as a heart surgeon. For the average person, this is something that should involve a mouse.
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Yeah, good luck with that
It also involves a tremendous amount of dialogue and menus with very small print that are meant to be played at a desk with a PC computer. I have a 50 inch LCD and was squinting from the sofa to read the novella that pops up any time you go to do anything.
I'm sure this game is fantastic on a PC and I would like to play it there. However, playing this for the few hours that I bothered it kind of reminded of when they put Starcraft on the N64. I never played it and never will. How you can possibly play that game without a mouse / keyboard is beyond me.
Farming Simulator 19
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My Grandparents ran an actual farm for the better part of 40 years. They would both get a real chuckle out of knowing that people will actually pay money to simulate one of the hardest jobs on the planet. They found it very amusing when I told them that there was a theme park of sorts in Thailand where people would pay money to see people milking cows on an industrial scale.
To be fair to Farming Simulator, the graphics are actually very very good and this game is actually somewhat playable on the PS4. The level of intense precision needed with the controller is significantly less than on Cities but still, there is a ton of information that comes flying at you in this game and for casual players like me, I don't think I really want to have an accurate portrayal of what farming is actually like.
I know what farming is actually like because I lived it (kind of) and it isn't fun. I do find some of the interaction kind of amusing because you pretty much sprint between your various vehicles and I can't really imagine my grandfather having done that.
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The fact that everything is super expensive is accurate and the fact that you are just a few months away from bankruptcy at all times is a rather realistic insight into the actual world of farming as well.
I don't know who finds it fun to meticulously plow a field and then plant some stuff and then wait months before cultivating it... but that person is not me. I can totally understand that there are people out there that would enjoy this sort of thing, and given the right equipment, such as not on my PS4, I might enjoy it as well. However, I don't feel like SIM games are very fun on a console and being introduced to these two games at the same time is not going to change that.
Sorry for being so negative and in all actuality these might be really fun games to the right audience but for PS Plus to release both of them to us at the same time almost seems like a slap in the face. First they offloaded the entire Uncharted library on us in the span of 2 months, and now a month of only SIM games.
It looks like I may actually end up finishing the Witcher 3 afterall.