It’s not straightforward to keep your eyes on the road when there’s a crackling azure nebula on the horizon; when the huge night glow of the planet below makes even the giant industrial gauges look like a multitude of petite, twinkling cat eyes. I, an Earth sucker, can’t support but be fooled by it all. But I have the feeling that all this cosmic wonder is just a meaningless puddle of grease on the rim of my Star Trucker’s plate. He’s seen things, that’s for sure. He’s come a long way around the spiral arm to slip past checkpoints and unload crates of liquor for unofficial cash. He’s seen Ginsters, shrunk to a neat wrapper, gleam in the darkness near the Tannhäuser Gate. I’ve hummed that Freebird solo a thousand times, waiting for the traffic to slim out near the Orion bar.
Space-driving sim Star Trucker is about a place where brake-fluid-soaked everyday life meets sprawling, celestial splendor. It’s a muscular, well-designed machine, but I think you’ll have to be in a very specific frame of mind to play it. To call it bulky would suggest a lack of purpose, and that’s not entirely fair. You can’t make a slight sideways turn without feeling every ounce of tonnage, so every turn or drop is a deliberate, calculated commitment. It’s a game about alternately shutting down your mind to relax and snapping into wide-open focus; about leaning back in your seat while keeping one eye on the diagnostics and never letting the Southern-fried licks slithering sweetly from the radio completely distract you from the unmistakable sounds of a flattening battery or an oxygen leak from the hull.
I found out the demanding way. My gravity compensator is dead. It’s not a complete 10-42 as far as crap goes. My fragile UCC circuits are safely packed in demanding cases lined with foam, but everything else is strewn and floating around my cabin. That’s fine. I’ll drive to the local cash n’ carry, buy a recent battery, put it in the GC and get back on the road.
You can tell a lot about a space sim by how complicated the docking is, whether you’re lowering the landing gear and positioning your ship in Elite Dangerous or enjoying the auto-docking cutscene in Rebel Galaxy: Outlaw. The docking maneuver here—the same one you’ll operate to hook up cargo—can be tricky to master, but it’s really just a matter of getting your butt in line with the magnetic lock, then retracting it without getting too excited and maneuvering your butt so you don’t tear a dent in your gear. To support you out, there’s a dedicated docking camera you can turn on on the cabin monitors. Wonderful.
Unless of course the lack of gravity means a floating battery blocks your view of the monitors. Curses.
This is the other side of the game: the physics, which occasionally veers into stream-friendly messy silliness, but is mostly explored to offer an correct simulation. There are six switches on the dashboard for separate interior and exterior lights. You have dedicated levers for grappling, warp-gate jumping, and emergency braking. There are switches for viewing diagnostics and cameras. You’ll manually replace every battery, circuit, and air filter. You’ll turn on the heater when you travel to a colder sector. And if you decide to stray from the designated lanes and eat some junk, you’ll have to don a spacesuit, launch from an airlock, and weld holes in your hull yourself.
There’s a certain sunset-beer spirit living in the gears of Space Trucker that makes the pursuit of numerical progress seem almost contradictory. Your cabin has a ton of gadgets and plenty of room for supplies, but it’s really peopled by the thoughts you bring with you—a wonderful place where simulation meets RPG. If there’s a score counter here, it’s your mileage, and that’s only because more miles on the counter means more views and more stories.
After all, there’s both money and experience at the end of the job, with penalties for behind schedule deliveries, damaged cargo, and traffic violations. What you don’t spend on more materials can be used to customize and upgrade your truck. Experience unlocks licenses for harder and riskier jobs, and the more you pave the road, the more likely you are to connect with other truckers via CB radio. Each one will have their own tasks that let you move the steering wheel and engines and learn a little more about the people you share the pumps with.
It definitely became second nature to me. I became deeply concerned about horn etiquette, learning to distinguish between who was honking at me in greeting and who was hurling abuse for driving like a negligent little shit. They could All he was throwing insults at me, now that I think about it. Star Trucker often uses your impatience against you as a difficulty modifier. You can always just make a straight shot through a sector, from point A to point B, but you’ll have to stick to the “roads” if you don’t want to deal with floating debris. Failures also cascade. Your suit has a separate charge meter for welding hull breaches, so two crashes in a row can easily result in an oxygen leak while you wait for the meter to charge. On the default difficulty, “death” really just means getting towed to the nearest auto repair shop and paying a lot of money, but there are custom options you can operate to tailor the game more towards a brutal survival simulator if you’re so inclined.
There is a version of Star Trucker that would be more in line with my personal fantasy preferences. I want to pick up hitchhikers and get my ass kicked and maybe take a little more personal care of my gear instead of just changing batteries and air filters. But there was so much thought put into it, Is Here, it seems impolite to focus on what isn’t there. Sometimes the authorities pull you aside to make a regulatory weigh-in. You can’t adjust your truck until you reach a certain mileage and the warranty expires, but body repairs at garages are free until then. There aren’t many options to satisfy your own criminal ambitions, but you can always throw a few cases of wine in the back to sell to protect yourself from fines from your latest accident – as long as you know where the next security checkpoint is.
These and other details make the game much more about the “trucker” than the stars, but the trucker really shines. When you exit the airlock to patch the hull, little white wrench icons indicate damage. The symbol that indicates the airlock to return to the truck is a house. I noticed this early on, and then I noticed it more and more. The more I did it, the more it seemed perfect.
This review is based on a test version of the game provided by the publisher.
