Tag: driving

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Game Ramblings #226 – American Truck Simulator

More Info from SCS Software

  • Genre: Simulation
  • Platform: PC
  • Also Available On: PS5, Xbox Series

I’m not generally a fan of score-based reviews. I don’t think they really map the subjectivity of user preferences to the objectivity of a number. For me it comes down to two buckets – recommended or not. Sometimes there’s a third bucket for me – games that are perfect for me right now. Sometimes it’s games that are legitimately great like Super Mario World as a kid. More often than not it’s games that I just vibe with perfectly like Final Fantasy XII. American Truck Simulator for whatever reason is one of those.

On its surface this is a game with legitimate obvious problems for a simulation game involving long haul trucking. Visually it’s fine but not a stand out experience with most areas only vaguely looking like their namesake with a couple particular things to match the real world. Traffic density never really changes whether you’re in a city or in the middle of nowhere Nebraska. The game has a real loose understanding of how traffic works in the US with a distinct lack of things like blinking yellow left turns. Traffic laws are extremely exploitable with things like being able to blast through the shoulder at full speed or run cops off the road to avoid speeding tickets. But really, none of that mattered as soon as I started vibing with the game.

When you’re driving around the environment really does become enough to convince you you’re in reality because I can recognize things that I’ve driven through. The curve of I-5 through downtown San Diego isn’t really the right scale but it’s there. The stupid giant cross in Effingham, Illinois is just as bizarre as it was when I moved west. The drive south past the Tacoma Dome and down through the coast of Oregon is convincing enough. I-70 through the midwest and I-5 through the central valley of California are both horrendously boring. It’s all just so compressed that you see highlights that are close enough and lose all the things between there that you hit a really good pace of something interesting to see very frequently while otherwise trying to deliver goods all over the country. I suspect as things continue to push east into other areas of the country that I’ve lived in I’ll continue to have those hits of familiarity.

It does help that the simple act of driving in the game is a lot of fun. I play enough racing games that I’ve got my wheel setup ready for a game like this, and that’s definitely part of it. It’s just fun to sit behind the wheel of something as large as a big rig in a way that I can drive without the danger of….having to avoid crashing. I can sit there and try to row through 12 or 18 gears without really caring about wrecking a transmission with poor clutch usage. However, the simulation-enough aspect of driving also has interesting side effects where I can’t treat this like a racing game. I have to properly manage my gear selection to make sure that I have enough torque to make it up hills. I have to maintain my momentum through uphills to try and avoid scrubbing too much speed. I have to manage my speed through engine braking going downhill so I don’t just runaway and risk tipping over. It sits in a very narrow band somewhere between simulation and arcade that pushes into the fun side of things over the realistic side of things.

There’s then enough on the business side of trucking to give me enough outside of driving to be interesting. The money I’m making is going toward equipment and garage purchases and hiring of drivers. Over time my ability to make money is becoming less and less important as my drivers are taking on more and more of the percentage of revenue of my company as a whole. What I assume my path will end up being is that over time I will simply stop doing deliveries and just managing and driving. There’s a lot of side content around discovery of towns to offer more locations to find jobs at or picture locations to discover for landmarks or dealers to purchase trucks from, and that’s awkward to do when you’re on deliveries. Right now you can purchase a truck and drive around without a trailer attached to do that, but they are also planning on releasing a DLC around Ford pickups, and that feels incredibly intentional. The long term of the game from the business side is that you become a manager and not a driver, and it feels like it’ll be much more fun to do the discovery driving in a regular vehicle.

So then why is this a perfect game for me now? It’s incredibly drop-in friendly. I’m in the middle of a project completion pass and time is inconsistent. Sometimes I have 15 minutes to kill waiting on a build to finish to test, and I can complete a local delivery. Sometimes I’ve got to kill several hours because I’m waiting on things like a multiplatform shader cache update and I can do a long haul trip of several thousand miles. Sometimes I need to distract a 5 year old and I can sit him on my lap and drive around because he loves to see big trucks. It hits such a wide band of my current potential use cases while not really requiring me to think too deeply about what I’m doing. I simply jump in, pick a goal, and drive. For right now, it’s simply perfect.

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Game Ramblings #112 – SnowRunner

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.