Truck Driver: The American Dream – Review

The first Truck Driver, from Soedesco arrived back in 2019 with mixed reviews, while it wasn’t upto the standards of the PC based Truck Simulator franchise, it was one of the only (and possibly the best) Trucking Sim available on the Xbox and has built 1uote a following thanks to great support from the developers ironing out a few launch issues.

Roll on to 2023, and now Truck Driver: The American Dream is getting ready to pull away, with a much more grizzled and grounded take on trucking. Starting off back in 1987 with a short prologue that leaves a great first impression, driving is a little simplified, but with unique and very effective special effects as you drive a few miles to reach a nearby shelter during a large storm and incoming tornado, it already feels a long way from the presentation of the first game as you’re introduced to a much more narrative driven story.

Back to the future, you’ll play as a self-professed loser aiming to turn his life around by stepping into his father’s shoes and driving a giant truck (the American dream, right?).

As you start your journey for the American Dream, you’ll be taking on a few small jobs with a friend who introduces you to the basics. working through a few jobs which are separated by chapters, you’ll eventually start working for a local company and taking longer hauls as well as earning XP and money to work on a basic skill tree to improve things like fuel efficiency and buy upgrades to improve the performance and aesthetics of your truck, there’s also a few other trucks to unlock, which don’t seem to cost anything to acquire, but you will have to be-buy any upgrades, so I found myself sticking with the first truck as there’s little difference performance wise.

Working through various jobs you’ll be hauling wood, cement, fruit and televisions across what’s essentially a pretty disappointing map, there’s a few too many long straight roads and even the “towns” are lacking any depth or population with little more than a handful of cars ever on the road around you, which greatly limits the challenge or the feeling of accomplishment.

Sadly, the map layout is one of only a few disappointing areas, so let’s take a look at a couple of shortcomings.

While the landscape and scenery are fairly well populated, the on-screen detail is kept at a minimum, especially at distance were there’s a hazy distortion that gives a scrambled appearance to distant features. It matches the overall sketched comic style we see on cut-scenes and does a fairly good job of preventing to many distant objects popping in to view (although this is still apparent in some circumstances).

While I can see the technical choice, and in some circumstances such as heavy rain, things work together well, but sadly it gives a constant lack of detail, even in the included photo mode, which despite a limited free camera, is otherwise well equipped, but when scenery and even other vehicles on the road are relatively bland and poorly detailed, it’s a mode that isn’t going to produce the shots we expect from a dedicated photo-mode option and as you’ll see from the accompanying screenshots (all taken on Xbox Series X), they might not paint the game in the best aesthetic quality, but in-game isn’t much better apart from during the prologue, when nighttime and heavy rain masks multiple other shortcomings.

Overall, the actual performance wasn’t too bad, though I did notice a few split-second stutters, but despite these the framerate seemed to pick back up straight away and wasn’t a massive impact on gameplay.

One area I really wasn’t impressed with was the sound, there’s a lot of voiced dialogue, between other drivers, people you work with and even on the phone to friends and family, the writing isn’t bad at all, but the delivery of the voice acting is often flat and emotionless.

On top of this the overall audio performance is disappointing, speech is clear (if poorly voiced), music is obnoxiously loud, while the mammoth 18-wheeler you’re driving is usually near-silent, and you’ll hear rain on the windshield and thunder in the distance, but you won’t hear any road noise, wind or other vehicles, which really makes the overall audio feel pretty poorly balanced.

Beside the graphical and audio shortcomings the game has a couple of weaknesses too.
Firstly, the truck control feels a little twitchy, there’s a half-second delay before turning really impacts the vehicle and then it swings far too quickly for a comfortable drive, add to this the camera choice limits you to in the truck (which most people will use) and three external views (which are off putting as soon as you get a cloud of smoke from the exhaust fill your screen) with a 5th overhead view that’s only really plausible for parking and collecting trailers. Camera turning is far too sluggish to utilise the external views, and I miss a simple bonnet camera.

Also, with a fairly dull map, that’s relatively limited, I found far too many occasions where you’re just driving along with the flow of traffics, cars would randomly slow down at a turn, only to continue driving straight on, and that’s about as much action as you’ll see.

Occasionally there’s an accident on-road such as an overturned lorry (one of the few times you’ll actually see another lorry on the road), because there’s no real activity on-road to make them the hindrance they’re designed to be, you can just drive down the wrong side of the road, or take a different route to ensure you’re not losing too much time.

Some jobs will place a time limit, which might make you think about your rest breaks or refuelling, but unlike the original Truck Driver, there’s no time designation, you just rest for a few hours, so there’s no tactics on taking set breaks to ensure you keep good time.

Truck Driver: American Dream does a great job of introducing a little more of a storyline to the franchise, as the conversations always felt like a back seat driver in the first game, but there’s more than a few issues that will need patching.

Coming in at £50, it’s really tough to recommend when it’s prequel Truck Driver isn’t any worse as a Truck driving experience thanks to years of updates and patches and only £26, while anyone wanting a longer narrative adventure would be better placed with Snowrunner, which offers a better base game and a year of DLC at a much lower price than the American Dream.

Overall, I’ve enjoyed my time chasing the American dream, but there’s a few too many issues that stop me feeling like a real Truck driver.

About Author