More Info from Saber Interactive
- Genre: Simulation
- Platform: PC
- Also Available On: Xbox One, PS4
This is sort of a ramblings in-progress, but in general it felt like a good point to do this. This is a lot like Forza Horizon, not so much in game style, but in the fact that it feels like the kind of game I’m going to repeatedly pick up to fill gaps here and there. There’s a lot of stuff to do in the game, and it always felt fresh doing a new task. It was never really that the tasks were new, or necessarily in areas I hadn’t seen. However, I was getting a constant drip feed of upgrades, new vehicles, and more that always opened up new ways to achieve things. Despite some pretty rough UI/UX spots, this is still one of the bigger surprises of the year.
This is basically a Euro Truck-style simulation, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a challenging and detailed experience that doesn’t leave you room to be lazy. Stop paying attention going downhill with a truck load? You’re probably gonna end up going to fast and running off the road. Being too aggressive with turning while climbing a hill? Be prepared to roll over. However, it absolutely breeds a certain type of patience in how it forces you to treat the driving experience, and it’s that patience that really drives the gameplay forward. You’ll screw things up in ways that in hindsight are blindingly obvious, add that to your mental checklist, and now be a much better driver for it.
It’s extremely gratifying hitting your end goal, whether it’s finding that perfect view on top of a peak while scouting out a new area or after convincing a huge trailer of goods to make it through a snowy pass or meticulously pulling a truck that’s stuck in the middle of a mud pit. All of these actions require some amount of careful planning, as well as a nice amount of skill on execution. You’re always going to want to bring the right truck (Need to pull a trailer? Bring something with power!), the right upgrades (Lifting crates out of a river? Bring a crane!), or even the right route to your goal (Doing a long drive? Plan a route with gas stations along the way!) The combination of planning and skill is at a point that feels rare, even in the simulation space.
The variety at play here is also a lot of fun. There’s a ton of different sizes of trucks that are better or worse at different things. If you want to go and see a new area, take a small SUV like the International Scout. If you’re looking to pull a bunch of goods, you’ve got all scales of different trucks to choose from depending on whether you want speed or brute strength. If you’re really looking to get through some bogged down muddy areas, go straight at something like a Caterpillar even if it means taking it really slow. That variety also works out well in the environment. You start out in Michigan, full of mud and water. You end up moving to Alaska and Russia where deep snow banks and icy roads become the king.
All of this is wrapped into a core loop that encourages you to kind of do what you want. There’s a number of spots in each area that require you to do repairs to improve your overall driving flow. This runs the gamut from taking care of downed power lines and rock slides to building new bridges to provide ways across rivers and canyons. Feel like just going out and exploring a bit? There’s some tasks to send you off on big exploration climbs in the woods. There’s also vehicles and upgrades to find scattered all over, improving your overall capabilities. Feel like just making some money? There’s all sorts of delivery tasks to do to just get yourself some hard funds. Each piece of this provides something directly beneficial to you, so even if you’re just screwing around, you aren’t wasting time.
However, like a lot of simulation games this one definitely has its pretty rough edges in the UI/UX space.
One of the first oddities that will hit you is in how they offer up tasks and missions. There’s a big ol list of them in your pause menu, and you can see the exact specific things that need to be done. However, you have to go to some specific spot to start the task, THEN you can deliver things. In cases where this is just deliverable products? Who cares, bring them on your way to the task, accept it, and immediately deliver it. But for tasks that require you to deliver some specific piece of equipment? Sorry, you can’t grab that until you accept the task. However, some of the tasks are gated behind progress anyway. It feels like once a task is unlocked, you should be able to just do the damn thing instead of having to drive around to hit yes on starting it.
There’s similar oddities in the general placement of things. Of the zones I played, there were two things that I really noticed – the garages where you go to upgrade and purchase vehicles are basically in a corner of the zone and gas stations tend to not be equally distributed. These two things aren’t really deal breakers, but it results in awkward flow issues. There’s sections of the game where you’ve got reliable access to fuel or easy access to the garage to modify your configuration. However, there’s as many times where you’re driving 15-20 minutes, realize you need to make a change to your vehicle and have to redo the entire trek again. Even worse is times when you simply are out of gas at the end of a multi-part task because you were on the one side of the zone with no gas stations. It may be a very “gamey” type thing, but centralizing the garage and making sure that gas stations are at least distributed better would go a long way to improving the overall flow of just being out and about completing things. Ultimately these things are easy to solve thanks to the fast travel button to take you back to your garage, so it feels weird that there’s a layer of friction in place to begin with.
At the end of all this though, this is a surprise hit. It’s a surprise hit in much the way that Euro Truck Simulator was a surprise hit to me. It’s something that should be a wildly niche product, and while it’s crafted with love it has a lot of rough edges from being in that sort of AA quality space. However despite it all I just couldn’t put it down for days. I would constantly be finding that new upgrade or grinding out a bit of money to pay for that new truck or taking my SUV out and climbing just one more peak, and loving the experience the entire way. It’s just one of those games that I can’t really explain why I enjoyed it so much, but can just recommend, and I’ll continue to look forward to jumping in to fill some time, even if for just one more delivery.
