American Truck Simulator Review Impressions

The loneliness of the long distance truck driver

In life, when you’ve chosen a career path as foolish as “video game reviewer” you sometimes find yourself fantasising about the good, honest job you’ll do when you finally give up. For me, it’s always been long-haul truck driver.   
                           
I honestly don’t know why I find that idea so romantic. After all, it’s just driving along roads—in the case of American Truck Simulator, often through the near featureless deserts of Nevada and California, the only states currently in the game—for hours on end, interspersed with visits to truck stops to eat greasy food and catch not-enough sleep in your tiny cabin. Maybe it’s having grown up with games like Elite—where you’re essentially a long-haul trucker, just in space.

Indeed, American Truck Simulator is like a strange, mundane relative to Elite: Dangerous, revealing that you don’t really need space combat to keep yourself interested in running your own haulage empire. Here, there’s no combat, no conflict at all.

At first, you simply drive from A to B—either chosen from a selection of jobs on offer, or if you’ve purchased your own truck, by choosing your own cargo and destination—and… well, that’s it, really. And yet, it’s utterly compelling.

First: driving a truck is a far greater challenge than I ever imagined; a huge, heavy, unwieldy thing, where it’s really best to not try and reverse-park your cargo no matter how many extra experience points are on offer (American Truck Simulator has a nice simple levelling system that allows you to unlock better jobs, cargo, and other options).

Yet SCS Software have made sure that the interface is always rewarding—even if you’re just playing with keyboard, there’s a special control mode to make sure you feel in control. You can increase the difficulty—challenge yourself with a fully simulated gear system, for example—but you can also simply limit yourself to control additions that aid the simulation of “reality”—making sure to indicate before turns, or honking the horn to move along the occasionally sluggish AI of other drivers.

As absurd as it sounds, there’s a zen-like feel to American Truck Simulator; that as a player you become one with your truck, and as you coast along the highways you space out in the very way you would on a long drive, letting the world pass you by, allowing you the space to think, reflect, and be at peace. Even if, in the case of American Truck Simulator, the distances are about a hundred times shorter than they are in real life.

There’s a great pleasure to the role-playing, too. With real-life radio stations available within the game, you can find yourself racing across Nevada while country hits blast. With penalties for driving through red-lights or speeding, you watch the roads like a hawk for cop cars. And there’s a huge pride in when you can finally afford your own truck—with or without an absurdly punitive loan from the bank to make up the difference. But it doesn’t stop there—you can choose to hire other drivers and run an entire business if you want. But you really don’t have to. Because American Truck Simulator is about the fantasy of, uh, “being a truck driver” you can choose to ignore that entirely.


If there’s any issue with American Truck Simulator, it’s that it feels like an expansion pack to Euro Truck Simulator 2, with almost exactly the same graphics, interface and experience. It’s entirely possible that you’d rather drive a truck in Europe (especially as the earlier game has a large range of expansions that open up the experience far further than the two states currently on offer in American Truck Simulator.)

Like Euro Truck Simulator 2, American Truck Simulator is also compatible with the Oculus Rift, and despite the fact that it doesn’t have the most up-to-date graphics, it’s a surprisingly perfect candidate for VR—with a steering wheel, it would feel so much like being an actual truck driver that I’ll never ever have to give up being a video game reviewer and get a proper job. I guess I just need to get an Oculus Rift first, though.

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