Star Trucker review

I’m not a patient person, generally speaking. I’ve been known to sit by the window for two days straight like a dog with a lead in its mouth waiting for a parcel. I’ve thrown more than one IKEA flat-pack across a room. And as for games, well…one day I really will collate all the texts I’ve sent Adam while trying to get through every Soulslike I’ve ever played. Which is why I was surprised with how well I clicked with the Star Trucker demo earlier this year. It felt relaxing, chilled, and utterly meditative at the time. I can only presume I’d been inhaling paint fumes unknowingly on that day, or had walked past a small dog on the way home from work, and was decidedly more mellow than usual.

Because returning to Star Trucker told a different story, one fraught with danger and near-misses, hull breaches, asteroid collisions, and at least one cargo container that I really hope burned up on re-entry before it could obliterate a small country.

I have come to the conclusion that you get from Star Trucker exactly what you put in. The game is a bizarre kind of mirror to your mood. Come at it with your feet resolutely up, enshrouded in your comfiest fluffy pants and it’s a delight. Pick it up on a bad day when even the clouds are getting on your nerves with how fricking slowly they scud about, and you’ll have a different experience altogether.

Star Trucker is not a difficult game. It’s not an action-packed thrill ride. There’s danger, yes, but it’s a slow-burn kind of danger like failing to notice your significant other’s new haircut. You won’t be aware you’re in any kind of trouble half the time, as a quiet little alarm tells you you’ve got a hull breach somewhere but frankly the inexplicably awesome Country soundtrack is drowning it out and these custard creams aren’t going to eat themselves.

In many ways, it’s a lot like Hardspace: Shipbreaker. It’s a second-job game, and like many real-world jobs a lot of it is kind of tedious. The core loop is traveling to space stations to collect cargo, then transporting said cargo to its destination without accidentally dropping it on a random moon. There are many secondary concerns along the way, such as maintaining your rig. You can adjust the intrusiveness of this in the options, but on the standard setting it keeps you on your toes.

Everything in the rig has a power source and a control panel. Oxygen, gravity, and electricity must be powered up, and your truck needs fuel. Take a few too many asteroids up the arse and you’ll need to go out in your space suit and patch up the hull, which is another level of infuriating if you try to rush it. Likewise, failing to shut things off before removing a fuse or power cell can result in the whole system tripping out, and this is anything but chilled, as you float around bouncing off the walls, trying to avoid taking cargo boxes to the nads as you struggle to reset the breakers. This is the most exciting element of Star Trucker, unless you count spending half an hour trying to reattach a lost trailer before it careens into the nearest sun.

It’s the controls I struggled with most. Switching out of cockpit view reverses some of the controls, while the external view feels weirdly detached. Hooking onto trailers or docking stations was fiddly for the first few hours until I started to get my head around it, and leveling up the rig for any reason is an exercise in attrition.

There are some nice elements though. One is the CB radio, which lets you communicate with a bunch of other truckers who’ll sometimes guide you to jobs or chat and flesh out some backstory. You have a few dialogue choices but they don’t change much. Another is the skill tree, which swaps traditional perks for new licenses such as permission to transport fragile, heavy, or perishable goods further and further afield, sometimes with extra conditions like time limits. Reckless driving, missing deadlines, or losing your load all result in hefty fines.

You can spend your hard-earned cash on making your rig look better, but you’ll mostly need it for new power cells and parts. Rigzilla (what I named my truck, unofficially) is a thirsty mistress, and you’ll need to keep her purring if you want to make that next long-haul delivery.

What Star Trucker lacks that Hardspace has is a sense of humour. There’s some good-natured banter on the CB, but the contracts you sign to take jobs are disappointingly straight, which seems an odd thing to pull the realism lever on when you’re piloting an American big-rig between two little greeny-blue planetoids with a container full of “medical gel”.

So Star Trucker is an odd one to recommend. If you like truck simulators, it probably won’t be sim enough, and if you like space-based smuggling games like Elite: Dangerous then it may lack the thrills and spills. But it’s a lovely-looking game at times, with some extraordinary views of outer space and some genuinely novel ideas. You’ll just need the patience of a saint to get the best out of it.