Food Truck Simulator – Review

Growing up you spent many days with your father as he ran a successful Food Truck business, but while the memories and rusting truck are still around, your father isn’t, so it’s time to step into his shoes and continue the legacy with your own Food Truck career.

Following on from just about every other thing in life being digitally simulated, Food Truck Simulator starts off with some pretty impressive pedigree coming to us from the developers of the massively under-rated Gas Station Simulator (one of my favourite Sim games from late 2022 and still easy to recommend now).

You start off with the simple task of repainting your family food Truck, before fixing up the cooker and fridge, ready to head out and collect some supplies.

Starting off, you’ll be forced to stick with Burgers, so you’ll have to go to the local store to pick up buns, meat patties, bacon, cheese and tomatoes, before heading to your first location to serve up some delicious burgers.

Like many cooking sims, you’ll have to pick, prepare and cook each item and then combine them to make the customers desired meal, a simple Cheese burger might only be a toasted bun, a slab of meet and one of the slices of plastic cheese, but you’ll soon be throwing together bacon double cheeseburgers.

Theres a gentle learning curve, eased by a helpful screen which clearly shows the required ingredients, as well as any required modifiers, such as meat needing to be rare, or well-done, which helps massively when you start progressing your business and upgrading your food truc. The first major upgrade will be fixing the deep fat fryer, so you can rustle up some fries, but before too long you’ll be cooking various foods, including my personal favourite, Pizza.

The game stretches beyond simple food preparation and serving, as you’ll also need to drive your truck to various locations and select what ingredient you keep and where to store them, meat kept on the Shelf won’t last long, so you’ll need to keep that in the fridge, while there’s always the option for storing long-term in the freezer.

It all sounds very promising, and the concept of customising, managing and making success out of your food truck has plenty to keep you interested, but it’s unfortunately plagued by some awkward controls,

Driving the truck is a chore, with slow, laboured steering and awful AI vehicles getting on your way. Locations aren’t bad and I got on with the flow of checking orders, cooking and serving meals, but the overall control scheme was a hindrance, thankfully I was using an elite controller so could utilise the rear paddles as the “A” button, but when you’re expecting to hold LT, then push in a direction with the right analogue stick while confirming with the A button, it’s enough to remind you that some games expect us to have three hands.

Rear paddle buttons was a workaround for me, so switching to the knife for cutting buns or tomato slices wasnt as bad as many will find it, but even just trying to select exactly where to slice with a knife, felt unnecessarily frustrating.

Control issues aside, I did find Food Truck Simulator feeling a little more of a chore than enjoyable. Taking the aforementioned Gas Station Simulator as an example,

The little mini games, throwing trash bags around, or chucking tires at the kid who keeps spraying graffiti made broke up the more standard tasks of cleaning, fixing flat tires, stocking shelves and serving customers, but the overall balance was still there regardless and Gas station Simulator was a game I happily invested dozens of hours into.

Unfortunately with Food Truck Simulator, there’s just not that same level of enjoyment, or variety.

Graphically it feels like the “open world” was biting off a little more than necessary, and when many simulators are (slowly) starting to push the boundaries of what we used to expect from the genre, Food Truck Simulator still looks and feels pretty dated.

its a shame a little more attention didn’t go into the control scheme and the overall flow, because the business management, serving various locations and multiple types of food, as well as the truck upgrades and customisation cooks up a pretty tasty experience, but it’s the combination of everything together which leaves it feeling somewhat undercooked.

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