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Android App Review: Truck Simulator 3D
Tue, 4th Feb 2014
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Just when you think app games can't get any sillier, I find this: Truck Simulator 3D, which is exactly as bizarre and unnecessary as it sounds.

It's astonishing just how many truck simulators there are on the app store. Does the world even need one? Apparently yes, and half a dozen others as well. I chose this one because it had 3D in the name, although I bet some of the others are probably 3D too (and just don't like to brag).

Truck Simulator 3D lets you race (standard enough), free drive (like racing, but without the ambition, I guess) and park. This is actually one of the options, right up there as if the fun and excitement of parking your cartoon (albeit 3D) truck is in some way comparable to racing or any normal kind of game mode. Parking? Seriously?

For most of the modes you control the truck with a steering wheel and pedals on the screen, but for the ‘free drive' mode you actually steer by tilting the phone. It's kind of neat to have different control in the one game, but it's a bit confusing having one mode work one way and the others work differently. Giving players the option to choose which setup they'd prefer might have been a better way to go.

Also worth noting: the controls for the truck are responsive enough, but the menu buttons really aren't. Selecting the option you want is way more hassle than it should be, and led to lots of angry finger-jabbing before it actually registered what I wanted to do.

I just … I just don't get it. If this was legitimately an accurate sim, and playing this game would help you to park an actual truck in real life, then I could see how that would be appealing. But it isn't remotely accurate or complex enough to satisfy like that – it's a novelty game. But it's not even fun in that sense, because this just isn't a good racing game. It's sluggish and frustrating. Any racing game where the slightest touch of a barrier or another vehicle leads to instant failure isn't a fun racing game, not in my book. Most of the appeal of pretending to drive a massive truck is, for me at least, getting to crash that massive truck. This game robs you of that, and I don't think that's forgivable.