Star Trucker review: Harder than it looks

Star Trucker will quickly make you realize that hauling goods in space isn't as easygoing as you might think

Star Trucker / Raw Fury

I have sunk an unreasonable number of hours into Euro Truck Simulator 2. I haven’t quite gone to the lengths some people have of setting up a giant rig in my living room just to play it more realistically – but I totally would if I could afford it. Chilling out listening to a podcast while cruising down open roads (virtually) is a great way to spend an evening as far as I’m concerned – with the added bonus that when an AI cuts you off and almost crashes into you, they don’t get out of the car to yell at you like it’s your fault.

The thing is, while I love trucking in that game, I know that if I tried to do it for real, I would be utterly useless at the many complexities of the job that the game smooths over – I skip backing the truck in at the end every time, and I’m not afraid to admit it. That brings me to Star Trucker, which doesn’t smooth over anything and makes me feel just as useless as I would be in real life.

Star Trucker / Raw Fury

“How much more difficult could one teensy extra dimension of movement be?” I foolishly think to myself as I set off towards my first objective, promptly crashing into it because I hadn’t considered how hard it is to cancel momentum in zero-G. The next few hours of gameplay didn’t go much better either, as I knocked my cargo trailer flying by backing into it too fast, spent at least five minutes lining myself up every time I had to dock with something, and continuously crashed into things because I was carrying too much momentum – seriously, I never realized how difficult it was to simply stop moving while in space.

Recovering from crashes isn’t as easy as just pulling into a repair yard either. When you crash you create punctures in your hull that you must then go out in your spacesuit to manually fix, or you’ll quickly suffocate from all the oxygen escaping the truck. Maintaining your truck is just as big a part of the game as delivering goods too, as all your ships’ systems – including your oxygen, gravity generator, and maglocks that hold your cargo in place – require both power and functional circuitry, all of which degrade over time. It means that you get a much better sense of actually running a vehicle than in other truck sims, which tend to focus more on the driving and business aspects of trucking.

Star Trucker / Raw Fury

If you’ve never gotten into a truck sim game before all of what I’ve described may sound tedious to you, and while I did find it somewhat frustrating, I also enjoyed every second of it. Learning the nuances of how I needed to slow my approach when reaching my destination was a very rewarding experience, and while I’m still nowhere near flawless, I have noticeably improved from those early hours and am starting to click with how space trucks work.

However, I wouldn’t say it’s the kind of game where you can just lay back and listen to a podcast while playing, mostly because the journeys aren’t long enough. You can get decent-length journeys once you’ve unlocked more of the map and a couple of perks, but ultimately I found it wasn’t long enough to sink into that chill-out state.

Rather than being a fully open world, it’s divided into sectors that you travel between using warp gates, which means that rather than long journeys being nothing but you and the open road, it’s a lot of stopping and starting, even when you start to get good at it. I have no doubt that doing that allowed them to be much more detailed with these smaller environments, but it is disappointing that a key reason I play truck sims isn’t there.

Star Trucker / Raw Fury

That said, I enjoy what’s there in its place, which is a story. The trucking business is full of all kinds of interesting characters, and you’ll get a chance to meet all of them – as long as by “meet” you mean, talk to them over your radio. There are a bunch of characters that all have storylines that gradually unlock as you enter new areas and get new skills.

It helps constantly push you into new areas, all of which come with their own challenges, like a region full of solar storms, meaning you have to shutter your windows limiting your vision to just the monitors in your cockpit. Plus, it helps add a dose of personality to the game, which helps make all of the hauling journeys feel like they have a point.

If you’re hoping Star Trucker will be the kind of game you can play indefinitely, then this isn’t it. It’s fun to play through until you finish the story and unlock all of the different areas, but what it lacks in longevity, the added personality helps make up for. It does a great job of capturing the physics of its setting, almost too well, leading to a steep learning curve, though overcoming it is very satisfying.

Score: 7/10

Version tested: PC (Steam)