They are just excuses to provide the buildings to service your trucks. It’s not really a ‘drive around a city’ game, it’s a ‘long haul across Europe’ game.
Downloaded the demo yesterday. It’s a fun game, and anyone with boys ages 5+ should pick it up right now (I don’t yet, but how could they not like this?!). Not sure I’ll spring for it at full price, but definately if it hits a Steam sale or some such.
Does the demo give you content around your selected home city? Thought it curious the ‘suggested’ start is in Germany, but I selected London, and have since driven to Paris. That’s already a fair amount of distance and content.
It’s funny that, after two years here in the UK, this is the first time I have ever driven on the left side of the road. Obviously I’ve been in taxis and friend’s cars, but it is a strange mental excercise when you’re not used to it, especially in a vehicle as wide as a truck cab. It’s really easy to be checking out scenery and drift over the white line and scare the bejesus out of a passing car. Also dirorientating getting out of the tunnel in France and being back to usual!
Didn’t try my trackIR or wheel yet; the xbox controller works great for steering and head turning since you don’t need nearly the fine level of control as you do race sims. Still, using a wheel will sell the whole thing so much better for immersion (and backing up!). Gonna bind the horn to my stick shift. Bunnnh bUnnnhhhh!
Hahahahahaha
Street lamps at the highway… is that in Belgium?
UK I guess from the fact that they exit the highway on the left side.
Can’t recall whether they have lamps on their highways as I had concentrate too much traversing England by car that one time (staying right lane to overtake someone + left exits and all the roundabouts where really taxing on me mentally.
I am amazed that this game exists, but I am grateful for it. The demo is awesome.
By the way, this is on Steam Greenlight. Hopefully, this can get approved. For some reason, I’m not able to vote for it though.
I enjoyed the demo for the first few hours. Then I started wishing you could explore the cities more. Not sure if the RPG/business sim aspects are enough to entice me further.
Isn’t that nuts? The demo is huge! I played for about 10 hours before I started hitting the geographical edges of the map.
I’m still not clear on what the limitations of the demo are. When I was playing the demo, I wondered whether they had put up the full game by mistake. I was never not allowed to do anything I wanted, or go anywhere I wanted. It was so generous, I probably wouldn’t have had to actually purchase the game, for my purposes. But I was happy with this generosity, so I bought it anyway, just on principle.
The forum ate my post, so I’ll simply say that the game does not limit you in any way compared to a registered player. You simply cannot advance past Level 4. You’re not going to build much of a shipping company within that time frame, and truck upgrades are tied to the level system. (The best upgrades appear at higher levels.)
Thanks for clarifying that, Yack.
Oh good, now I feel better about being captivated by this demo for a few hours last night.
:D
Am I correct that buying your own rig is going to take a loooooong time? Cheapest I found was over 100k, and jobs tend to return 3-5k a pop (thus far at least, I admit I was interested in shorter hops at the moment). That about right?
You can take out a loan.
Also, most trucks require you to be Level 10 or higher in order to purchase them.
I was having a difficult time describing the actual driving portion of the game to someone else. I know in the podcast I talked about the ponderous driving as you take a truck from one warehouse to another, but I couldn’t really get a good handle on how to adequately sum up the experience. It’s slow… But what else? What makes it compelling to me?
I finally figured it out.
There are point to point missions in Test Drive Unlimited 2 in which one of the douchey young rich people give you the keys to their Ferrari and ask you to drive it a few miles without getting any scratches on it. Collisions, leaving the road, even bumping into other cars will result in a loss of money. Because the game is built around going fast with no consequences, driving carefully is actually more challenging than it sounds. The AI cars on the road have a habit of switching lanes and stopping suddenly just like real idiot drivers. They will hit you if you’re not careful. The risk/reward structure of these missions is pretty cool although it does mean that success depends on driving a supercar at frustratingly slow speeds.
The normal driving missions in this game are like that, except you don’t have to talk to a douchey raver before leaving. Also, by the very nature of these being big-rig trucks, you don’t have the option of trying to drive 200mph if you get bored.
Yep, those and the delivery missions (where your reward was directly related to the condition of the car) were some of the most fun I had with those.
In fact, the very first Burnout game, which didn’t have the insane whizzbang speeds of its successors, was my favorite “play in traffic” game for that reason. It was simple, the speeds were human, the traffic realistic and you really WERE better off not crashing.
So yeah, this is “play in traffic” but with a campaign and a LOT of varied terrain and the stakes for not crashing even higher. What’s not to like? :)
I enjoyed Test Drive: Unlimited, but the shitty road geometry in the game whenever there was a change in road elevation made those “don’t get a scratch on it” missions pretty annoying. You’d have to take the bend at 5 miles per hour as your car bounced around the jagged road model or else risk careening off the other side into a tree.
I hated the control model as well. Just worked like shit with my wheel, so I always ended up using a gamepad.
But besides that, I absolutely loved the concept and a lot of the execution.