Keep rollin’ rollin’ rollin’

I feared this would happen. It was foretold by an ancient Mayan calendar, and Nostradamus mentioned it somewhere. It’s a simulator game that I like, and won’t take the mickey out of. Much.

From the studio that brought us Euro Truck Simulator (numbers 1 and 2), Trucks & Trailers has you in the shoes of a trucker. Your job: to navigate your way through loading depots, various car parks and rest stops. It’s nowhere near as easy as I thought it would be. Why? You have no control over the trailer you’re hauling around the place. This suddenly makes the game interesting, when reversing your truck doesn’t do what you want it to. Don’t let me get started on parallel parking either.

There’s a smorgasbord of missions, and you can get 4 rankings – gold, silver, bronze, and completed for each one. You can only get a medal if you finish the mission without your cab or trailer hitting anything, however. As per usual, the shininess of your medal is dictated by the swiftness of your parking.

Everything seems simple, but then you’ve got to navigate the other vehicles/obstacles in the area, as well as take the actual size of the compound into account. The controls are great, and unlike other driving simulators I can mention (I’m looking at you, Bus and Cable Car Simulator: San Francisco) not every button on your keyboard does something. For example, I’m not going to be driving along and then accidentally open the doors on the side of the bus, and spill my fleshy contents onto the sidewalk (American game, American lingo). The worst I can end up doing is unlocking the trailer and having it slide along the ground, ready for me to pick it up again.

There are a couple of things that I think are a bit of a shame – you start the game with all the trucks/cabins unlocked. I feel that there should be something to work towards – I’m still going to be wasting my time trying to get the gold medals on everything, but why not be rewarded by more trucks (or maybe decals and extras. I wanna pimp up my cabin with a Hello Kitty sprayed on the side, and a little wobbling hula-girl on my dashboard)?

Graphics-wise, the game looks fine for a year-and-a-bit old game, and the audio’s rather simple but realistic (not that I’d expect much else from a driving sim). I managed to crank video settings up to their max, keeping a steady frame rate, so no worries there.

A solid buy, if you’re into... haulage..