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My first version of the American Truck Simulator review was back not too long ago and mostly discussed some of my disappointments in the newly-released Texas DLC, which as I found out through the wiki for the Truck Simulator series the stuff I wanted to see in the Texas DLC weren't there. College Station, my hometown, wasn't there. Houston, was, but there was no Northwest Freeway, no loop roads, no South Freeway, no 249, no Hardy Toll Road, and while it does I-10 West it's not truly Katy Freeway with its luxurious 5+ lanes. In Austin, they have the double-decker I-35 and the five-stack junction of Highway 71 and I-35, but that's it. No Mopac Expressway (a.k.a. Loop 1, Austin's alternate north-south highway where for (at least part of it) trains will often rumble through the median), no 85 mph speed limit toll road bypasses. In Waco they got the overpass to Valley Mills Road but then crammed downtown in the same space, and didn't even give the freeway three lanes in each direction (which it did prior to construction). Galveston does at least have Highway 87 back up to I-10 (it used to go to Beaumont before being washed out by Hurricane Jerry and never repaired).

Even had the Texas DLC had been I wanted, I figured I should've played more of the game to justify it. The general look and feel of the game is great (definitely better than Cities: Skylines or its sequel) but it doesn't feel like a real world because there's no brand names (and even billboards seem the wrong size). I spotted a "Ray's Hamburgers" sign in Los Angeles, ostensibly a shout-out to McDonald's, but the signage is straight vintage Burger Chef, once one of the biggest competitors to McDonald's. The last Burger Chef closed in 1996 and CKE Restaurants Holdings (last owner of Burger Chef and current operators of Hardee's/Carl's Jr.) still makes attempts to control the Burger Chef trademarks, so why not have it here? Besides, the truck brands are real, to the point where seeing a Kenworth-branded truck service center was a bit jarring (do they have branded truck service centers like that? I've never seen one). The first time I wrote about ATS I mentioned Ray's Hamburgers and its relation to both McDonald's and Burger Chef, and in Version 1.0 I wrote that "if it were up to me, I'd start writing to every brand in the U.S. and consider anything that didn't request a fee." I'm sure that at least some would consider the free advertising.

When I initially reviewed American Truck Simulator, my computer was somewhat antiquated and one time it frame skipped enough that I found my truck veered off on the side of the road on the opposing lane of traffic. This is perhaps the most unrealistic aspect of the game—anything like that in real life would be a horrific accident...and of course, with that sort of thing the immersion is lost. On a later run, however, on a new computer, I did try it again and things went swimmingly. My truck was still rather slow, of course—in addition to handling issues, California (base game only comes with Arizona and California, the rest are paid DLC products) restricts speed on commercial trucks to 55 mph. You could push it to 60 mph, but I live in an area where outside of urban areas the speed limit is 75 mph. Once I mashed a cruise control button and continued down the freeways, it felt amazingly comfy and reminded me of the parts around San Antonio and points beyond, which was nice. Unusually, I encountered no heavy traffic the entire way. I get that no one wants to be virtually stuck in traffic (and this is perhaps where that Austin part is most unrealistic) but sometimes being a trucker is reacting to the traffic around you. My journey came to an end when I pulled into a "Wallbert" distribution center around the Arizona border just as the sun was about to set (the Wal-Mart Distribution Center in New Braunfels is hard to miss, and the relation wasn't lost on me)...until it came time to back into a truck bay, which I struggled to do...and all that nice feeling went away. (That's why I only have a "C" class license in real life, I guess.)

That was what killed the game for me, though. If it's nice, comfy moments punctuated by agonizing, frustrating pain, that's not the experience I want. It's not like in Factorio where you could get into a zen with your factory continuing to grow punctuated by bug-hunting, it's not even like INSIDE (which I'll get into another day) where you walk and jump until you die and figure out what you need to do to not die, or jumping around a beautiful but hostile world until boss fights. I looked into mods, but the few that deal with the map are outright replacements (and none of them seem particularly to die for). I even asked Reddit about bigger or more cities. Maybe if the in-game cities were disappointing there might be an option for something more interesting and presumably people in the know could point me in the right direction; but alas, that wasn't the case.

In the end, the problem is that American Truck Simulator runs too much on a particularly niche group. Even if you enjoy video games you would find ATS too boring, a casual gamer would find the loading/unloading portions too frustrating, and a detail-oriented person would find the highly-abstracted game map too limiting and unrealistic. That was my problem. When I tried to go the full experience I was unhappy at the poorly scaled world and the lack of things one would see on the actual highways, when I tried to zone out and just enjoy what was there I got a rude awakening with trying to back up. It wasn't for me, but who is it for?

All the images used here are official images from the developer's website.

FINAL RATING:   

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