You can choose to race with other tracks in two or three simple tracks, and there is a mode where you can just drive a truck to deliver cargo to your designated location. The second mode might be bit boring, since you do nothing but drive a truck and do nothing more, but it's worth it for two reasons - primarily the extremely beautiful landscape you drive through. It is designed with the utmost care and detail and you can really feel like you're really there. And secondly, the game simulates the job of a truck driver pretty accurately. While driving, you get to experience what a real truck driver feels and does on the road. Now, multiply that by a 1000 miles. But mostly, this is a truck racing game. You can change the view from behind the wheel to outside of the truck, whatever you like. There is also a good rearview mirror that helps you while driving. Overall, this is a fantastic truck simulation and racing game and you should try this one and the games sequels, Hard Truck 2 and the rest of the game's series.
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And, to be clear, it is a racing game, not a truck-driving game like its successors, although it does have some elements of that. Primarily the fact that you can purchase goods and deliver them. Except, there's no open world, which one could argue is essential for a proper truck-driving experience. Instead you deliver goods by completing race tracks.
And for a simple racer Hard Truck does have a lot of complexity. You can earn money, buy new trucks and upgrades, there's a relatively decent damage system, weather effects that you have to adapt to (e.g. turning wipers on when it's raining). The handling is pretty responsive, although a little jerky.
The star of the show here is the tracks. They're huge and not only have many shortcuts, they have entire alternate paths. And the surfaces are completely unpredictable. Sometimes there are rocks on the road that you have to avoid, sometimes there's a swamp ahead (that looks like a slightly greener texture of grass, so the first time I drove right into it), the elevation keeps changing, so you have to slow down at times to avoid leaping into air and crushing your truck.
That being said, with all these cool little immersive features, it still ends up being a somewhat lacking experience, because the core gameplay is pretty basic, and the amount of content is pretty scarce. There's only a few tracks in the whole game, and the difficulty is pretty hardcore. This isn't helped by how the game barely explains anything to you, leaving you to discover its nuances through trial and error. I suppose kids these days would call this "the Dark Souls of racing games".
And while I find its graphics charming, they're clearly behind by 1998 standards. They use a blend of 3D and 2D, which doesn't age well without a proper remaster. Tbf they do squeeze the most out of this approach, some of those 2D animations look stunning, but the overall aesthetic is still rather bland.
In addition to all its problems, it's really hard to make work on modern systems. I used a 32-bit prefix in Wine, which might've given me an advantage, but Windows users have no such privilege, so I don't even know if it would work on Windows 10, let alone Windows 11. But even though it ran fine on my system, occasional crashes were inescapable. This is a game in a dire need of a remaster. Not that it's so good that everyone needs to play it, but it's still a curious and ambitious project for its time, and it needs to be preserved.