Truckful Review

You can only take on one mission at a time. Given that this is a delivery game, you’d naturally expect to juggle multiple packages along a route, but the mission structure strictly forbids it. Truckful operates less like a business simulation and more as a vessel to tell its story. When accepting a job, you get the sender’s current location and the receiver’s drop-off point with just enough detail to point you in the right direction. Missions feature bonus objectives to earn extra currency, layered with strict restrictions; cargo must not take damage, deliveries must beat a tight timer, or you have to complete the run without repacking your vehicle. Missing these bonuses is disheartening, to the point where I constantly reloaded checkpoints just to nail the perfect run. There are also side missions you can tackle for extra cash; they don’t push the main narrative forward but follow the exact same rigid structure.

My absolute biggest complaints revolve around the map and navigation. The game world is broken into segmented areas separated by loading screens. While the load times are incredibly short, it breaks up the gameplay flow and immersion. Accessing the map itself is a chore with no quick-pull shortcut; I’d pause the game and have to manually tab over to the map screen almost every time. You do get an early upgrade that adds a makeshift GPS to point you toward your objective, but with only three upgrade slots available on your truck, you’ll quickly have to temporarily swap it out for something else. I desperately wish this was a permanent, hard upgrade rather than a slotted item. I think the developers intend for you to memorize the world layout, but that never naturally happened, making traversal an absolute slog. Even for a game where you learn by doing, the 2D perspective and fixed camera angles constantly disorient rather than guide you. The mapping and navigation fundamentally need work, and it’s all made exponentially worse by a camera that actively fights against you.

A massive part of the Truckful loop is customization. As you bank money from deliveries, you unlock new colorways, engines, suspensions, wheels, and cargo sizes. Some of the later wheel upgrades are fantastic, like the “suction cup” tires that provide glorious, glue-like grip on the pavement. For your cargo bed, there are options for every style of driver: a covered pizza wagon, tall, short, long, or even caged beds. Keep in mind, no upgrade completely prevents your vehicle from losing items; instead, they might just make you more prone to tipping over entirely.

The roads themselves hold a surprising amount of nuance. Asphalt is your best friend for pure speed, but you’ll soon be introduced to dirt, grass, and water hazards that dynamically kill your momentum and dramatically reduce handling as you fight the physics of the surface. Off-road tire upgrades eventually make these terrains less punishing. Sadly, there is no traditional fast travel, though you can unlock tunnels that significantly cut down transit times between zones. Another odd design choice is the presence of sheep and stray boards occupying the streets, which you have to clear by aggressively honking your horn. It’s a cute gimmick at first that quickly sours into an unnecessary speed bump, directly hampering your experience when you’re sweating a timed mission. They simply shouldn’t clog the roads as often as they do.

If your vehicle gets destroyed, the game is highly forgiving, letting you restart from a generous checkpoint or scrap the mission to start over. It’s not an inherently punishing game, but physics-based chaos happens. When you aren’t running main or side missions, you can tool around in free-roam. Ultimately, there isn’t much to actually do out there besides hunting for collectibles or gathering scrap. To that point, pacing can feel a bit out of sequence; scrap appears early in the game with a cryptic warning that it doesn’t have a purpose yet. Honestly, it would be better if it simply didn’t spawn until you could actually use it.

The UI surrounding those aforementioned upgrades also needs a serious pass. They feature a little pop-up box detailing exactly what the part does – but if you accidentally dismiss it, like I did, there is literally no way to recall that information. You just have to buy it and blindly test it out. There’s a lot of this, to include dialogue with characters at the beginning and end of missions.

Visually, Truckful pops. It features bright, vibrant pixelation contrasted perfectly with heavy darkness to balance the tone. It has an incredibly strong, distinct look. While there are barely any graphical options to tweak, it is incredibly well-optimized; I easily locked in a buttery-smooth 180fps on my monitor at all times. The game supports ultrawide resolutions in the menu, but the actual gameplay won’t render wider than 16:9. It replaces the black sidebars with a stylish comic pop-art border, but I definitely would’ve preferred native 21:9 rendering. Minor gripes aside, this is a fantastic looking and performing game on Linux, and is Steam Deck verified ✅.

Ultimately, Truckful is a game that suffers death by a thousand cuts – a pile-up of minor, compounding issues with its map, UI, and occasionally unruly camera that slowly chip away at the fun. Yet, despite those constant roadblocks, the core foundation remains surprisingly charming. It is very much a game about the journey rather than just the destination, and when you are barreling down a dirt road with perfectly packed cargo and an eerie mystery unfolding around you, it largely succeeds. It’s a cozy, wildly unique time if you have the patience to not take it too seriously, making it a trip worth taking for fans of physics-based oddities, even when the navigation frustrates you in ways completely out of your control.