Star Trucker review — Dangerous business

There are games that put you in the combat boots of an elite commando as you push back the denizens of some alien world. There are other games that stuff you into a tiny cockpit as you take tight corners around famous Formula 1 tracks. I’m sitting in a comfortable chair waiting my turn to take this load of fertilizer through a jump gate to Heaven’s Rest via Gamma Valley, courtesy of Medusa Six. You see, I’m a long haul trucker. No, not from Florida to San Francisco. I mean moving cargo from this end of the universe to the other. Hazardous, not all that profitable, and occasionally just illegal enough to get you arrested, the life of a Space Trucker is dangerous business. Let’s get out on the open road, so to speak, and see if there’s any money to be made in Star Trucker.

Star Trucker is a long-haul trucking simulator from developer Monster and Monster. You’re brand new to the job, and with little more than the precious manual in the glove compartment, have been turned loose with a handful of batteries, some air scrubbers, and a CB radio. Through the kindness of your fellow truckers you’ll learn your craft, try to ply your trade, and earn enough to stay on the road, astronomically speaking. .

Eventually you’ll earn enough experience points to go up a level, earning a skill point. There are a total of 13 “Fast & Risky” skills and 13 “Safe & Sound”, with 7 shared skills. Fast & Risky might enable you to learn how to EVA (Extra-vehicular activity, aka heading outside in your spacesuit) better, but also grants you -30 to power consumption and -15% air consumption, so even if you’re not interested in doing just-in-time jobs, you might pick up the EVA training to prevent battery drain. Similarly, you can’t haul breakables unless you spend a point on the Safe & Sound side and earn the certification. In the middle you have valuable loads, heavy loads, and additional expansions to both. You essentially have two different gameplay loops here, so picking one almost precludes the other, at least in the beginning.

You’ll encounter a number of other truckers, including Barrow the grizzled veteran, Red Eddie and Sour Candy, a brother and sister duo offering up your introduction to the job depending on which side of the skill tree you choose. G-Bee is the gate keeper / mother type to the whole menagerie, ensuring you don’t venture out too far until you have the right certifications or safety gear. There are a total of five zones to complete, all eventually leading to the “One last side job” mission locked at the end. Each of the personalities you meet are fun and well enough acted where you don’t mind hearing from them, breaking up the miles on the road.

You can haul trailers, and even multiple trailers, and all of different types. Sometimes it’s fertilizer, occasionally it’s make-up, medicine, or aluminum. You’ll also haul Helium, recycled textiles, PVC pipes, Cotton blocks, and all sorts of nuclear waste. Each offers up a certain amount of cash for completing the job, with the job board showing you how many hops away it is, when it has to be delivered, and any other pertinent information you’ll need for the job. For the just-in-time deliveries, I do wish I could use the bed in the truck to sleep away the time, but that’s not a feature in this game – you’ll just have to listen to the radio and wait. Since the time is 1:1, if you are 40 minutes early, you are literally in for a 40 minute wait. Trust me when I say, jump through the gate back and forth twice to move the clock and take the penalty. Some jobs aren’t worth the headache or gate fees.

You can also haul goods inside your truck. Each store has items like fiber optic cables, beer, and clothing. All of these are stored on shelves in your cab… or you can leave them strewn about on the floor – it’s your rig. Just make sure you don’t have breakables outside of a container as they are susceptible to electric shock, being dropped when gravity is restored, or anything else that might jostle them. Damaged goods are worth less, and we’re trying to make money. Naturally, you can also transport illegal goods. You’ll have to avoid places that scan your goods, and you’ll need a place to fence them, but I leave that to the more unscrupulous among you.

As you zip around the various stations, you might occasionally spy a small bit of debris worth more than the garbage around it. You’ll need to EVA to pick up these bits of salvage, but batteries, air filters, fuses, fireworks, spools of wire, narcotics, and much more are yours for the picking. It’s another source of precious cash, if you take the time to stop and nab it.

The difficulty level in this game is very, very, high without upgrades. Every tiny piece of debris rips through your truck like paper mache, causing a breach. If you so much as tap a piece of debris, scrape an overpass, or otherwise smack into something solid with the truck, two things will happen – you’re likely to incur a financial penalty for your reckless driving, and you’ll have to perform an EVA to go out and weld a patch panel over any leaks that are spilling your precious oxygen out into space. Oxygen is expensive, so leaking it is just money pouring out of your cabin.

The problem isn’t the breach per se. You see, breaches cause your oxygen to vent, but it’s far less likely that you’ll die from asphyxiation, instead you’ll likely die from not having enough money to swap out scrubbers and batteries. Everything you do in your vehicle runs on batteries, fuses, air filters, and gasoline. All of these things cost money. You’ll be swapping these out, a lot. For reasons unknown, in the future there are no alternators in vehicles, so your batteries do not charge, instead becoming a consumable good you’ll need to swap frequently. Turning off your circuits at the breaker panel will allow you to safely change them. Pulling them without doing this can throw all sorts of breakers, possibly causing a lot more damage in the process. They’re expensive, so take the second to flip the switch.

You don’t have a dispatcher per-se in Space Trucker, instead selecting your own jobs from a Job Board port in the station. There are other ports out there, acting as general stores, upgrade shops, body shops, paint shops, and more. At places like the body shop you can repair your vehicle as well as add a whole host of cosmetic adornments like smoke stacks, grills, hood ornaments, and different looks for your sensors. The paint shop, shockingly, will allow you to paint your vehicle various colors, and also allows you to repair the hull. What you’re looking for, more urgently, is the upgrade shop.

While Star Trucker looks like a “dad game” on the outside, it’s very much a survival game. It’s a theme in Star Trucker, but too often I found myself just picking which death I’d like to embrace – fiscal or physical. A trip to the upgrade shop allows you to upgrade your rig’s armor, resistance to electrical shock, how well your suit recharges, and eventually how good your sensors are at detecting valuables floating around in the heavy soup of debris around every station (especially the aptly-named, densely-populated Junk Fields), and how fast your EVA suit recharges. There are 10 upgrades in each system, costing progressively more the higher you go. Sadly, there are no upgrades for your various subsystems like oxygen efficiency in your cab or the like, so you’re stuck with swapping batteries on the regular. That said, every dime you have should go to putting armor on your truck as soon as possible. The ongoing campaign tutorial is all about telling you how to get your truck painted, when it should be telling you how to help you survive. Trust me when I say that it transforms the game from infinite frustration to something more enjoyable.

There is one aspect that would help you dig out of the death spiral that is so easy to trigger – the ability to take a loan. There’s no mechanism to take a loan (other than death, which automatically charges you into oblivion), so once you get into trouble, it’s hard to get out. Taking a job is well and good, but if you can’t afford the batteries, air scrubbers, or even the gas to get where you are going, you’ll just end up rescued and even further in debt.

The other issue that can kill you is the RNG nature of the game. Sometimes a store will have air scrubbers, and sometimes they won’t. If they don’t, and you need them critically, your day is done. You’ll get picked up with emergency services, costing you $2500 for repairs, $750 for emergency aid, $750 for recovery services, a penalty for breaking your contract, a penalty for a lost load, and more. You can overdraft up to $5000, (and once you hit $2500 you’ll be limited to essentials till you pay it back) but frankly you are probably done as once you hit the 5K mark as they repossess your rig. There’s little hope of recovery at this point. Yes, you can tweak all sorts of levers like oxygen usage and such, but on default difficulties, one bad dice roll and you can find yourself in a position where you are just stressed, running from place to place spending half your time in your EVA suit because you can’t afford oxygen, only to do it all over again when you pay for repairs and try to stock up on batteries. Then you’ve got people like Sour Candy who keeps running you through jobs, then laughing like an idiot having stiffed you of any payment, leaving you for dead. Some balance work is needed.

There is an economy of inconvenience at work in Star Trucker. The further out, or the more dangerous the location, the more you’ll likely be charged for the goods you can find there. If you want to engage in it, it’s not an official contractual thing, but you can earn money this way. Buy low, sell high, so they say.

The other source of financial woe is other drivers. The AI has little self preservation in this game. They’ll barrel into you occasionally. They’ll run into one another. They don’t care one whit about what you’ve got going on – they have somewhere to be, allegedly, and by the grace of the machine god, they’re gonna get there. Once, we got plowed into so hard from behind that it obliterated the trailer, driving our rig directly into a nearby structure and costing us both the run, and incurring an “unsafe driver” penalty. While I was 1.4 yards away from docking with a job board, some asshat pad rammed me off, and I got a ticket. How is that right?

As you take missions for the various personalities around the ‘verse, you’ll eventually do enough to earn B-Gee’s trust that you won’t get yourself killed on more dangerous routes. She’ll grant you passage to the other spaces around the map, giving you access to higher paying, but more dangerous work. For example, one part of the map is susceptible to high-intensity solar flares. If your rig isn’t insulated against this, the best you can do is crank up your AC and hope for the best. The correct method is to buy upgrades to prepare yourself, lower your shades, and navigate the space via your crummy green monochrome monitor. It’s exactly the crappy monochrome cheap stuff you’d expect, providing just enough to navigate via its semi-fisheye lens. These same places might also have your core thrusters overheating if you run them too long, and you’ll have to occasionally EVA outside to pull a lever to vent any fires that might occur. Other areas of the map have the opposite problem – freezing from inactivity. You can again EVA out to throw a switch to heat them, or you can pull a choke switch to heat them faster, with a cost of additional fuel for the increased thaw speed. Time, materials, cost, or danger – there’s always a trade-off.

There is a great deal of variety in missions in Star Trucker. Sure, there’s plenty of things to lug in this mundane box of things from A to B, but you’ll also need to handle loads that require special permits and handling procedures. You’ll even bust up rocks for money on occasion. I don’t want to spoil these, but the whole game isn’t just driving from here to there and back again.

Graphically, Star Trucker is pretty solid. The inside of the truck looks the part, and the space is very well-populated with little details. Every switch, port, door, bin, and item has lights, scratches, and surface detail that makes it feel used and lived-in. Heading outside the truck, the rigors of zipping through the chunks of debris that are literally EVERYWHERE in this game has taken its toll. Scratches adorn every surface of the rig, and little weld plates are stuck anywhere you’ve needed to patch. The canards on the thrusters open and close with your rig’s maneuvering thruster’s firing, as do the smaller thrusters to push the truck wherever you need to go. The green monochrome monitor for backing up and looking around the vehicle are exactly the sort of cheap semi-fisheye junk you’d expect your trucking company to throw into your rig. The truck is where you’ll spend most of your time, and the team has done a great job in ensuring it looks the part.

The vastness of space is obviously a black void but the developers filled it full of stars, highway paths with guidance lighting and signage, gorgeous planets in the distance, security checkpoints, weight stations, other rigs and passenger vehicles, gorgeous nebula skyboxes, and a whole lot of debris if you step off the beaten path. A closer inspection of that debris alarmingly suggests smoke stacks, engine parts, and other rig detritus – a warning on how perilous this job really is. The stations tend to look a little samey – often round structures with little ports for rigs to dock. You’ll also travel to processing stations and manufacturing spaces. These tend to be more labyrinthine in nature, requiring a lot of careful maneuvering to safely navigate. They also look greasy and industrial. Heading into the aforementioned space with all of the solar flares, the air around your rig cooks from the rising temperatures, causing a wavy distortion effect. While this may be an indie title, it sure doesn’t look like one.

We ran into a few bugs in Star Trucker. More than once we had the controls lock up entirely after being rescued, unable to select anything. A restart didn’t fix that – we ended up having to start an entirely new game to fix it. This happened twice, thankfully early on in the campaign. Similarly, “Hey Lucky, want me to take a look at those busted shutters?” being asked every minute until you say yes might not be a bug, but wow is it aggravating. Even if I ignored her, she was right back on my CB, bugging me, despite the fact that I was on a job and busy. Another issue is a job board and a store in Tanktown that absolutely guarantees you’ll be struck by cross traffic as they just don’t care that you’re trying to dock. Another bug we hit, literally, was a drop-off point where we bounced off the indicator box. The assignment was to deliver it to Darkside, Bay DSA4, and all before 7:30am. It was 6:33am, but instead of a delivery, we ended up with hull breaches and aggravation. It’s a known bug, but this game seems to have a whole delivery of them at times – as if Space Trucking isn’t difficult enough.

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