It’s not easy to keep your eyes on the road when there’s a deep blue nebula crackling on the horizon, when the voluminous night glow from the planet below makes even the giant industrial gauges look like so many tiny, sparkling cat’s eyes. I, a terrestrial idiot, can’t help but be taken in by all this. But I get the feeling that all this space wonder is just ordinary grease pooling on the edge of a restaurant plate for my Star Trucker. He’s seen a few things, that’s for sure. Skipping through security checkpoints and taking the long way around the spiral arm to empty cases of booze for unlicensed money. Seeing the reduced, clear Ginster wrappers glowing in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. I’ve hummed that Freebird solo a thousand times while waiting for traffic to ease near Orion’s shoulder.
Space-driving sim Star Trucker is about where fluid-soaked mediocrity meets vast, sublime grandeur. It’s a muscular, well-designed contraption, but I reckon you need to be in a very particular frame of mind to play it. To call it heavy would be to suggest a lack of purpose, and that’s hardly fair. You can’t make a slight crabbing maneuver without feeling every bit of tonnage, and so every yaw or descent is a deliberate, considered commitment. It’s a game about alternately relaxing your mind and shifting into wide-eyed concentration; about leaning back in your seat, sitting back, and never letting the southern licks drifting sweetly from the radio distract you entirely from the heralded beeps of a flattened battery or oxygen-draining hull breach.
I learned the hard way. My gravity compensator is out of juice. Not exactly a 10-42 among the crap. My fragile UCC circuits are safely packed in foam-lined hard cases, but everything else is scattered and flying around my cab. No problem. I'll just pop into my local cash n' carry, get a new battery, pop it in the GC, and get back on the road.
Whether you’re talking about a space sim, lowering the landing gear and aligning your ship in Elite Dangerous or enjoying a light auto-docking sequence in Rebel Galaxy: Outlaw, you can tell a lot by how complicated docking is. The docking maneuver here—the same one you’d use to tie down cargo—can be tricky to master, but it’s essentially just a matter of lining up your rear with a maglock, then backing out without getting too enthusiastic and putting a huge rip in your gear down the butt. To help you out, there’s a dedicated docking camera that you can turn on on your cabin monitors. It’s awesome.
Unless, of course, there's a floating battery blocking your view of the monitors due to lack of gravity. Damn.
That's the other side of the game: the physicality, which occasionally veers into chaotic nonsense that goes with the flow, but is mostly explored to deliver a comprehensive simulation. There are six switches on your dashboard for separate interior and exterior lights. You have dedicated levers for docking, warp gate jumping, and emergency braking. There are toggles to cycle through diagnostics and cameras. You'll manually change every battery, circuit, and air filter. You'll crank up the heating when you travel to a colder sector. And, if you decide to stray from the special lanes and eat some rubble, you'll have to don your spacesuit, launch through the airlock, and weld the hull holes yourself.
There’s a certain sundowner spirit to Space Trucker’s gears that makes numerical progression feel almost antithetical. Your cab has plenty of room for stuff and supplies, but it’s actually filled with the thoughts you bring with you — that sweet sim-meets-RPG place. If there’s a score counter here, it’s your mileage, and that’s only because more miles per hour means more scenery and more story.
There's both cash and experience at the end of the day, though, with fines for late deliveries, damaged cargo and traffic violations. What's not spent on more supplies can be used to customize and upgrade your truck. Experience unlocks licenses for tougher, riskier jobs, and the tougher you get on the road, the more likely you are to communicate with other truckers via your CB radio. Each will have their own mission, allowing you to flex your steering and thrusters and learn a little more about the people you share the pumps with.
It's in my blood, for sure. I found myself deeply concerned with honking etiquette, learning to tell who was honking at me and who was hurling insults at me for driving like a reckless idiot. All he was insulting me, now that I think about it. Star Trucker often uses your own impatience against you as a difficulty modifier. You can always shoot straight through a sector, going from A to B, but you'll have to stick to the 'paths' if you don't want to deal with floating debris. Failure is also cascading. Your suit has a separate charge meter for welding hull holes, so two crashes in a row can leave you leaking oxygen while you wait for the meter to fill. On the default difficulty, 'death' essentially just means towing to the nearest garage and paying a bunch of cash, but if you're up for it, there are individual options you can use to bring the game closer to a brutal survival sim.
There's a version of Star Trucker that appeals to my personal fantasy tastes a bit more. I'd rather pick up hitchhikers, eat shit from a bad egg man, and maybe take a little more care of my vehicle than just changing batteries and air filters. But there's a lot of thinking involved in what to do is Here, it feels rude to focus on what isn’t there. Sometimes you’ll get pulled over by the authorities for regulatory weigh-ins. You can’t customize your truck until you reach a certain mileage and your warranty runs out, but body repairs at garages are free until then. You don’t have many options for satisfying your own criminal desires, but you can always throw a few cases of wine in the back and sell them to help support the fines from your latest accident—as long as you know where the next security checkpoint is.
These and other details make the game more about the 'truck driver' than the stars, but the truck driver really shines. When you exit the airlock to fix the hull holes, little white wrench icons mark the offending damage. The symbol marking the airlock to get back to your truck is a house. I noticed this early on, and kept noticing it later. The more I did it, the more perfect it felt.
This review is based on the game review structure provided by the publisher.