Players will step into the shoes of a young man in the year 2014 as he arrives in California to pursue his dreams of road domination and capture the Californian cargo transportation market.
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Couldn't find the Linux version. Does it really exist?
For a game that spent about 8 years in development, it feels like it was made in under a year. I imagine, as with many things in Russia, somebody must've pocketed most of the budget. Between 2002 and 2012 SCS Software was putting out a truck-driving simulator each year, sometimes two a year, and they were all better and more complete games than this.
This game is just broken in almost every aspect. Starting with the graphics that look atrocious on max settings. The lighting effects and bloom are insane, some of the shadows look like they came from the 90s, and it's so poorly optimized that it can't output a smooth framerate on my computer that was manufactured 7 years later and was one of the top-tier laptops of its time. I immediately turned off all the effects and shadows, but there's still really bad aliasing, and the maximum anti-aliasing available is 4x, which makes the game look okay, but still doesn't fully solve the problem.
There's now this terrible story mode, which you can thankfully disable. The cutscenes have horrendous animations and voice-acting. In addition to disabling the story, there's a toggle to disable cutscenes, and yet even with both disabled there's still a ton of unskippable cutscenes in the game that play every time you enter a warehouse, gas station, repair shop or any other enter-able building. And they're all long as hell.
The previous two games (Hard Truck 1 and 2) had this old school rock/metal soundtrack, which was alright, but this game has a radio with several stations that play different genres. I mostly listen to hip-hop and some electronic genres (grime, old school dubstep, garage, jungle, etc.), so I can't really speak on the quality of other genres in this game, but the hip-hop music here is just abominable. They must've found royalty-free music or some really desperate broke rappers because this shit is garbage.
The one area where the game doesn't totally suck is the gameplay. It's not as arcady as its predecessor and clearly takes cues from the SCS Software games. It's a totally serviceable truck-driving gameplay. You pick up cargo, drive it to the destination, make money. I didn't really notice any obvious ways to hire drivers, but there were menus that allow you to manage your little trucking company, which I assume is probably the biggest feature of this game, but I never got far enough to really check it out.
However, even in the gameplay I found noticeable downgrades from Hard Truck 2. In particular, you can no longer communicate with other drivers, police or mafia, which makes the open-world feel less like an inhabited place. The collision physics are somehow worse than in the older games, and are frankly embarrassing for 2009. Although the destruction model is pretty decent, the actual collisions feel worse than in the original Ridge Racer. And the cops are completely useless here. Unless you stop your truck, they can't do nothing. I drove half the map with cops chasing me and eventually I just lost them.
Speaking of the map, this game takes place in California instead of a made-up vaguely-Russian map of the last game. The devs boasted in dev diaries that they actually went to California and photographed a lot of it to accurately recreate it in the game. That's cool, but it doesn't really make much of a difference, when you can only drive on the highways. Every city is represented with like 3-4 buildings, the rest is just inaccessible decorations of pretty low quality and with no life in them. In general, the graphics here are pretty bland and technologically way behind the 2009 standards.
In conclusion, this isn't the worst game of all time. There's definitely some joy to be derived from it, but I can hardly understand why anyone would ever wanna play it, considering how SCS Software practically perfected the genre. By 2009 they had made 7 games in the 18 Wheels of Steel series and the original Euro Truck Simulator. I haven't played all of them, but even the first game from 2002 is better than this.
For a game that spent about 8 years in development, it feels like it was made in under a year. I imagine, as with many things in Russia, somebody must've pocketed most of the budget. Between 2002 and 2012 SCS Software was putting out a truck-driving simulator each year, sometimes two a year, and they were all better and more complete games than this.
This game is just broken in almost every aspect. Starting with the graphics that look atrocious on max settings. The lighting effects and bloom are insane, some of the shadows look like they came from the 90s, and it's so poorly optimized that it can't output a smooth framerate on my computer that was manufactured 7 years later and was one of the top-tier laptops of its time. I immediately turned off all the effects and shadows, but there's still really bad aliasing, and the maximum anti-aliasing available is 4x, which makes the game look okay, but still doesn't fully solve the problem.
There's now this terrible story mode, which you can thankfully disable. The cutscenes have horrendous animations and voice-acting. In addition to disabling the story, there's a toggle to disable cutscenes, and yet even with both disabled there's still a ton of unskippable cutscenes in the game that play every time you enter a warehouse, gas station, repair shop or any other enter-able building. And they're all long as hell.
The previous two games (Hard Truck 1 and 2) had this old school rock/metal soundtrack, which was alright, but this game has a radio with several stations that play different genres. I mostly listen to hip-hop and some electronic genres (grime, old school dubstep, garage, jungle, etc.), so I can't really speak on the quality of other genres in this game, but the hip-hop music here is just abominable. They must've found royalty-free music or some really desperate broke rappers because this shit is garbage.
The one area where the game doesn't totally suck is the gameplay. It's not as arcady as its predecessor and clearly takes cues from the SCS Software games. It's a totally serviceable truck-driving gameplay. You pick up cargo, drive it to the destination, make money. I didn't really notice any obvious ways to hire drivers, but there were menus that allow you to manage your little trucking company, which I assume is probably the biggest feature of this game, but I never got far enough to really check it out.
However, even in the gameplay I found noticeable downgrades from Hard Truck 2. In particular, you can no longer communicate with other drivers, police or mafia, which makes the open-world feel less like an inhabited place. The collision physics are somehow worse than in the older games, and are frankly embarrassing for 2009. Although the destruction model is pretty decent, the actual collisions feel worse than in the original Ridge Racer. And the cops are completely useless here. Unless you stop your truck, they can't do nothing. I drove half the map with cops chasing me and eventually I just lost them.
Speaking of the map, this game takes place in California instead of a made-up vaguely-Russian map of the last game. The devs boasted in dev diaries that they actually went to California and photographed a lot of it to accurately recreate it in the game. That's cool, but it doesn't really make much of a difference, when you can only drive on the highways. Every city is represented with like 3-4 buildings, the rest is just inaccessible decorations of pretty low quality and with no life in them. In general, the graphics here are pretty bland and technologically way behind the 2009 standards.
In conclusion, this isn't the worst game of all time. There's definitely some joy to be derived from it, but I can hardly understand why anyone would ever wanna play it, considering how SCS Software practically perfected the genre. By 2009 they had made 7 games in the 18 Wheels of Steel series and the original Euro Truck Simulator. I haven't played all of them, but even the first game from 2002 is better than this.