The Slaverian Trucker Reviews

WERNER

TL;DR: Kinda special open world fixed economy physics based arcade trucking game made by a very passionate single developer, is not comparable to My Summer Car, very wide, kinda shallow sandbox, but fun and very special atmosphere. 3/5 stars. This game cant be compared to my summer car, so disregard reviewers that do that. My Summer Car is an authentic experience of being a young male finn in mid 90s rural finland, and you get a really detailed recreation of the Datsun 100A you get to build and customize at a very detailed level, the engine itself requires you to actually get it to know and it takes a lot of real time effort getting the thing to run correctly. You have none of the fidelity of vehicle simulation in this. I guess most people dont play MSC correctly (no mods, no premade saves, permadeath, only way if you ask me) anymore because "rural looking area where you can do some stuff" isnt what MSC is (just) about, the life sim is secondary to the car maintenance sim. This game has lower fidelity of car maintenance simulation than some car "games" for DOS, abstract percentage for health of engine, wheels, suspension, you use repair points from a "repair kit" item that can repair both engine and radiator, wheels and suspension. It is absolutely not where you will find the charm in this, it is elsewhere. It is better compared to Eurotruck simulator, or Motortown, with some very janky Fallout New Vegas inspired setting and side-gameplay and some kinda unpolished and sparse late 00s/early 10s stalker mod levels of gameplay depth and experience. The game does feel like a passion project, though it really needs some polish, even for jank. This game is slavjank, it feels very much intentionally so. The world doesnt feel very slavic, though, more like if Fallout: New Vegas was made by The Long Drive dev and that life of Boris guy. It is a strange mix of dully shaded assets intended for two second survival jank flips. There is deformable terrain and an economy that is very easy to find extremely profitable niches in that never disappear because the game economy never really varies. You can drink beer, but you dont get drunk, you can piss, but you dont die if you dont pee, and there is no penalty for peeing the wrong place, like on cops or into the face of a homeless person. There are cigarettes, they do nothing, you dont even really need to sleep, you cant really die from hunger even on longest hauls. Also if you want to get into any of the fnacy stuff, you will need to kill a dog, it is not like in Postal 2 where you can throw a dog treat to non-violently pacify a dog. Kinda sucks, that part. Where the game really shines is in its atmosphere, it feels less like a trucking sim or a car mechanic sim, or even a post apocalyptic RPG and more like a Life of Boris "that totally happened" slav-themed tall tale generator, set in a world that reminds me of the desert in Xavier: Renegade Angel if it had an MDMA comedown hit too hard. It is a fun walking-with-wheels simulator, you can do whacky stuff, there is a bit of a physics puzzle element to trucking and salvaging the other vehicles you want. You need to explore to figure out things because the wiki cant keep up. The dev seems friendly any nice. Cant wait for the dynamic economy to become a thing, also I would wish the game was harder, much harder, the updated engine you start out with has way too good performance both thermal and torque-wise. I would wish cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, etc had actual addiction and actual uses to it. I would wish parts wore out faster, I would wish I could take apart the engine. I would wish the fuel economy was wood gas and ethanol based instead of fossil fuel because fossil fuel extraction just doesnt make sense in an apocalyptic world. I would wish travelling the roads was actually dangerous, I would wish I actually took damage and died from crashes, I only just recently dsicovered that mesh of truck can even be deformed and it wasnt after tumbling for hundreds of meters down a mountain, or head-on collission with speeding truck, or slamming into a lightpole at 100+ km/h, it was from an NPC car lightly tapping me on the corner of my truck after I backed out unto a road and didnt see it slowly approaching me. There are no raiders, the cops do nothing but look intimidating, even if you ram their cars out of this plane of existence nobody comes to even give you as much as a small fine of 100 slaverian dollars. There are many things I would wish with this game, because for now it is just a mostly fun but very barebones low-fidelity half-sim physics based trucking arcade game set in a kinda delulu life of boris inspired post apocalyptic desert mountain island world. I give it 3/5. Will keep playing.

This game is a blend between MSC and The long drive. Its super fucking janky but I love it! If only there was collision in the game. I drove into a wall doing 100 and i didn't die and the truck was fine

love this game, it have some hungaro-polish lore , but enviroment is like kazach steppe mechanics are awesome, i hope there will be more updates and more npc with quests , huge potential

I've had a blast with this game. I love the exploration aspect of the game as well as the mechanical one. Driving is enjoyable but the world could be more inhabited. I've done a few of the quests but I wish there was some sort of Journal to keep track of all the jobs and gigs.