Truck Driver: The American Dream is a sequel of sorts to SOEDESCO’s original not-so-serious truck driving sim. The big thing here, though, is that this one has made its way to current gen consoles. Dig into it, however, and you might feel like it’s been released into early access.
Beginning with a mad dash to safety during a horrendous storm, Truck Driver: The American Dream soon puts players in the shoes of the son of a trucking hero. After spending years not really making much of yourself, it’s been decided that maybe you should follow in your father’s footsteps. Luckily his best friend is at hand, who agrees to take you under his wing and teach you the ins-and-outs of trucking. He’s also pretty intent on giving you general life advice along the way.
While Truck Driver: The American Dream is a simulator, it’s not one that bogs you down with too much nitty gritty. You’ll need to perform tasks such as turning your engine on and off manually, for example, and you’ll also need to avoid doing things like running red lights, otherwise you’ll get a fine. On the flip side, no one’s going to bother if you don’t follow all the rules of the road, and if you crash, not much happens other than you perhaps needing to visit a garage in order to fix up your vehicle.
You only need to play Truck Driver: The American Dream for a few minutes, though, to realise that it’s simply not very good. You might be able to get over the disappointment of its less-than-stellar visuals, and its cringey dialogue is so bad that you might actually find it entertaining. What’s less forgivable, however, are the terrible physics and awkward controls. When you find yourself struggling to simply make your truck accelerate while turning from a standstill, you know there’s something wrong.
When you’re in full swing, driving to trailers before connecting them and taking them to their destinations, among other tasks, Truck Driver: The American Dream can be kind of therapeutic. That is, until you get a particularly long job – then it just becomes a boring slog due to the shallowness of the actual act of driving. Then there’s the irritating traffic to contend with, with other roads users acting moronic at times. Oh, and also crashes. Not the vehicle hitting vehicle kind, the software kind: this is a game that crashes a lot.
With a lengthy story to complete, and a free roam mode apparently “coming soon”, you can have some fun with Truck Driver: The American Dream. At the moment, though, it simply seems too rough around the edges to recommend. And even when it has been polished up, it still might not be the engrossing truck driving simulator that we were hoping for. The actual act of driving a truck just isn’t all that convincing here, unfortunately.
Truck Driver: The American Dream is available now on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
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