Monster and Monster just gets it. The two-person development team (with some friends) have made something incredibly good with Star Trucker. It embodies everything that’s so attractive about the Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator games, and puts that concept into space, with every understanding of the complexities it brings. Truck simulator veterans will be right at home, but there’s a lot to learn that will bring them down to novices. Star Trucker is a truly stellar truck sim that’s one of the best for the genre.
There’s not really a story that gets you into the cockpit of your embiggened rig, but the fact you’re in a big rig the size of a spaceship with rockets attached, is kind of all you need. You’ll select your difficulty, of which there are four: driver, recommended, mechanic, and hardcore. I played on the recommended difficulty, because it was recommended – and I found this to be fairly challenging as it was. From there you’re off to do as you please, though there might be some directed quests, you’re left to your own devices. Ideally you’ll want to rise in ranks by completing jobs tailored to your experience and the time you want to invest, in order to be noticed by the Department of Intergalactic Vehicles (DIV) in order to go to new, exciting, and more profitable places.
When you look around your cockpit, you’ll see tons of screens, dials, switches, and a full dashboard to take in. There’s a CB radio that you’ll use to interact with other truckers and confirm dialog choices you make. There’s shutters you can close (like the ship in Independence Day), you can control whether thrusters are on or not. There’s a radio you can listen to music and ads on, but there’s unfortunately only one radio station. I hope more get added, as it feels a bit one-note, as great as it is. There’s a dedicated lever for your truck horn. The instrument cluster tells you your speed, how much fuel you have, and how much oxygen is in the cab. For long hauls, you can enable cruise control, and adjust the speed as you like. You have full control of all lights from headlights, auxiliary lights, roof lights, cab lights, rear cab lights, and the mezzanine lights. Depending on the temperature of the system you jump into, you’ll have to adjust the heater for: cold, cool, moderate, warm, and hot temperatures for comfort. And if that wasn’t enough, there’s a separate knob for the blower to be: off, low, medium, high, and max (complete with sound to confirm that). There’s levers to attach your rig to a trailer, a big handle up top to complete jumps to other systems. There are two monitors, to the left and right that you can have display anything from a docking camera to imitating left and right mirrors, and even power percentages. There’s one final lever for the emergency air brake, which is great for stopping nearly on a dime, but it will expend air you maybe don’t have from the cab of your rig. With all of these interactable objects, you think that’s enough, and then you realize you can get out of your seat, and there’s so much more to explore.
Maglocking is the process of aligning the rear of your truck cab to visit stores or pick-up and drop-off cargo. This is something you’ll be doing a lot, and you can do this one of two ways: use the external camera to align yourself, or while in the cockpit, use the docking camera, which clever runs at 30fps. I do find the fact that you have to maglock to everything except upgrade shops to be rather tedious. On the other hand, it offers a great way to practice this. I did find my skills improving and essentially barreling at a lock full speed, doing a 180°, slowing down as align on the circle to grab the cargo, and essentially do a burnout. It feels good when you can get it all down, and doing that in zero-g is an achievement unto its own.
A large majority of your time will be using the map to navigate your jump points to get from system to system quickly and efficiently. You’ll always be toward the next jump gate, and you can either beeline it there, or use the stellar highway lanes. The latter can be ignored, but they do well to align you to the jump gates and ensure you don’t encounter space debris or came into the path of an oncoming rig, risking damage to you or the precious cargo you’re carrying to the destination. Star Trucker has so many things to run into. Should the unfortunate happen, you can take your rig to a repair station, or you can do it on-the-fly. Once stopped, you can get in your spacesuit, exit the airlock and seal each of the hull breaches manually, then you can get back to driving. I do like that the known quantity is that there’s no sound in space, but Star Trucker ignores that so it can cleverly let you hear the radio from the outside, truck horns blaring, and hear the thrusters…thrusting.
For the first few hours you’ll be interacting with a lot of basic systems. You’ll need to be aware of power and fuel at all times, and be cognizant when power cells are getting low and need to be replaced. Your gas tank displays driveable distance in “miles”, whereas all lightspeed travel shows distance in light years that you don’t have to manage fuel for. I had a situation where oxygen and gravity systems failed due to their power cells running out. This meant I was running out of oxygen, so I had to pilot my truck in my space suit to make it to the next port to buy supplies. The systems here can seem really fiddly at first, but upgrading your skills and buying better gear can decrease their annoyance. It doesn’t help the early game dealings, though. And to that, whatever difficulty that is, perhaps restart on an even lower one.
The more advanced systems of Star Trucker are some of its more exciting ones to interact with. For instance, cold thrusters are a thing. If you underutilize the thrusters, they will grow cold will be shaky until they’ve properly warmed back up. If you want an added challenge, then try disabling “Drive Assist”. Here all movement will rely on Newtonian physics to carry you, and while this will be hard to get used to, it does use less fuel as a result.
What happens if you run out of air? You will pass out, but not die, and be brought to nearest station to recover. If there’s a warranty on your truck, then the repairs and fuel are free. There will be a slight fee, but something where you’ll pay the bank back. This is easy enough to do in just a few simple jobs to put you back in the black.
In the menu of the game, is where you’ll get a lot of your information. Convoy is all the characters you’ll interact with, and they have specific story quests to complete, and can keep track of them here. Jobs are the one-off freight and side jobs that you take on. The map helps you plan routes, and showcases how much you have left to discover across its 30+ systems. Cargo shows what you have on your truck and what you’re hauling, up to three trailers and if they have any damage. As you rank up, you’ll earn points that can be spent at stations to increase your skills. These include but aren’t limited to increasing your space walking time, taking on valuable cargo, going on longer hauls, and carrying hazardous materials. If you’ve played SCS Software’s games, you’ll find the skill tree familiar here.
I’m not the biggest user of photo modes, but Star Trucker needs a photo mode very badly, there’s so many cool things you could do with it. This is a gorgeous game, running in Unity, and every system you visit gives an incredible sense of scale. I was able to get an average of 90fps at 150% of the render resolution (3440×1440), with all settings at the maximum. It’s an incredibly performant and beautiful game, only a few issues with pop-in.
My PC Specs:
– Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
– Intel Core i9 13900K @ 5.8GHz
– ASUS ROG RYUJIN II 360 ARGB AIO Liquid CPU Cooler
– G.SKILL TRIDENT Z5 6000MHZ 64GB (32×2) DDR5 RAM
– ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4080 16GB GDDR6X
– WD_BLACK SN850X M.2 (4 TB)
– LG UltraGear 34GP950B-G (21:9 Ultrawide @ 3440×1440)
Star Trucker competes with the likes of American Truck Simulator and is able to keep up without needing to catch its breath. Monster and Monster’s truck simulation is a game I thought would be a novelty, but it turned out to be so much more. There’s nothing like cruising through a system to deliver cargo while you’re leaking oxygen and you’re about to exceed the deadline given to you – do you risk it for the extra money? This and many other questions is what you’ll be asking yourself. Star Trucker is as challenging as it is rewarding, and it’s out of this world truck simulation not to be missed.
A Steam code was provided in advance by the publisher for review purposes
