Decades of playing games that strive to replicate real vehicles and real battles has rewired my brain in ‘interesting’ ways. The other day, while pushing a wheelbarrow down a garden path, I found myself mentally interrogating the realism in Star Trucker, a fetching £20 diversion that makes no realism claims whatsoever.
Demonstrating the kind of joyless literalism that Viz’s Mr Logic was known for, I quickly convinced myself that human pilots would play no part in the kind of inter-stellar freight distribution that ST models, and that if they did, they would certainly operate ‘big rigs’ fitted with APUs and sophisticated autopilots. Deep space truckers struggling to reverse into tight loading bays, and manually replacing portable power cells in order to keep vital ship systems running? Preposterous!
If developer Monster and Monster had listened to their internal Mr Logic, Star Trucker would be far more plausible.
It would also be staggeringly dull and no longer on my hard drive. One of the main reasons I bonded with the sim during its 3×3-style audition, was that the lion’s share of that first three hours was spent nervously navigating busy sectors, gingerly docking with cargo pods, and cautiously spacewalking, hull patches in hand, not typing data into a nav computer or yawning while warehouse drones attached or detached loads.
After causing a couple of costly traffic collisions through dangerous driving, and almost dying of negligence-linked asphyxiation, I actually started wondering if the sim was too demanding, too hands-on, for its own good. Happily, that worry vanished when I discovered that custom campaigns offered admirably granular difficulty options.
While its hard not to think of the terrestrial trucking sims of SCS Software while pondering job lists, reversing pods into delivery bays, or tuning the in-cab radio, I do wonder if Star Trucker will have the long term appeal of American Truck Simulator or ETS2.
Although the scenery in the handful of sectors I’ve visited thus far, is rather splendid, because sectors can be traversed in a few minutes, and the player uses jump-gates to travel between them, at present I’m not getting that satisfying sense of long-distance travel I get from earthbound spedition sims.
And because its not mandatory to keep to what pass for roads within the sectors*, there’s not a great deal of the kind of unscripted traffic interaction that help keep conventional lorry sims stimulating.
* True, if you do, you reduce the risks of colliding with debris.
I’m sure some Cornerites will have many hours of micro-g trucking under their belt by now. If you’re in this group and don’t mind sharing… Does hauling cargos between Star Trucker’s bustling transport hubs lose its appeal after a week or two, or is this a long vehicle sim with longevity?
As someone who has probably spent more time playing truck sims and space games then I have flight sims over the past few years, I have to admit I couldn’t get past the box art for this as it seemed a bit silly. Sounds like it might be worth checking out after all. Thanks for the scouting mission!