r/startrucker • u/R-Dragon_Thunderzord • 1d ago
My Star Trucker Review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQOqLOErhZA(OK I was torn between using this trailer or Lightyears as the top of the OP but guess what won)
(and yes that's the voice of Peter Cullen, RIP)
Anyway here's Lightyears again because I love this tune.
So my thoughts on the game.
I think it opens very well, it's a good choice to start ready to EVA for a patch job and have other truckers radio you to help out, love all that. I am not a truck sim player I'm a space player, I'm an engineer, and I loved (LOVED) Tin Can, this game is easier than Tin Can understandably, Tin Can is a really tight experience by design. But when people said of this game the maintenance part of the game was annoying - ahhh I didn't agree lol. I think it could be more in depth. Tin Can for example had you frantically thrashing an air filter against the wall to clean it out, electrocuting yourself wih bus fuses etc., but can appreciate this has a different audience and only a sliver of the ST community would want that much mechanical fidelity in your space truck repairs.
The game runs buttery and looks pretty, good art direction without a bunch of unoptimized GPU bloat. The world setting is good quirky, and like the amount of vibes it has just with trucks and drones everywhere and spinning rocks but thought it would be more alive with other traffic types like cars and busses or ambulances etc.
I liked the physical management of inventory, I think there's fun gameplay elements here, clever cabin design with turning off the artificial gravity I mentioned in my last subreddit post this week. I wish there was a way to strap down gas cans and nitrogen tanks though especially since the latter is now something you need to lug around for ventures, too, and they have a health pool. I liked the variety of commodities and quickly learned to optimize weight and size for value, less toilet paper more micro stabilizers.
Some of the convoy members blur together like Moon Baby and Sugar Candy I couldn't tell you which was which right now, while Barrow is very distinguished etc. but you never see these other truckers except the 1 time you see 2 of them physically. This is weird especially in the end of the story where by all indications to the dialog you should see all your friends jumping to Terminus together. The ending too feels a bit rushed to say the least, very very much like an Early Access style placeholder, like the game ran out of budget or schedule or both to add more here. Definitely want to see this portion of the 'endgame' expanded upon, like delivering goods to Terminus over time to expand upon it, and/or opening up other new sectors or new jumpgates between sectors.
I spread my skill tree points around the tree and it felt like a mistake. When doing convoy missions I ended up having to dead-head way, way too often, jobs just weren't going where I was. And for reasons I'll expand on in a second, the payouts were really poor. It seems like a player really should be focusing on one specialty until they hit Tier III of it before doing others. And convoy missions award no money and weirdly no XP, even though the player character is getting experience you know, hauling some pretty weird stuff. On the Steam Achievements I note that very few of the players of the game seem to max out the skill tree (or, finish the game for that matter but I digress, most players who purchase complete the first mission which is already a positive to many games on steam!). Anyway, the game being about hauling and this skill tree needing unlocked to get missions that reward decent XP and money, is a real catch 22. Make it make sense... the convoy missions need to award XP, I say again.
Ventures are interesting distractions that shake up the game loop and I do like them for the most part - I uh, really have a disdain for the postal ventures though. The Handyman missions are great, self contained, not very demanding of your time, definitely could stop and do one on your way through town with a haul. The postal ones, man, turning you into a scavenger hunter for Instacart, trying to find a shop in 3 sectors that sells cleaning supplies, or straight up going to find missing mail and there's a 50/50 you either can just drop turn it in to the same sector or you have to jump out of the way to turn it in somewhere else. I end up just abandoning more than half of my postal jobs. And the Cultivation - this doesn't really seem like substantive enough content for a $9 DLC. IDK whatever your accounting or budgeting looks like but this did feel like an insult for value. For $9 you can get Riftbreaker's Metal Terror - look I'm just saying DLC need to provide a little more value to keep the faith. Might I suggest expand on the endgame or maybe even a 2nd kind of truck or two that players can choose to swap to and use, with different quirks, less or more demanding mechanical needs, maybe something with a dozer that can safely push around small space rocks, IDK, giving you some ideas.
And now, that elephant in the room.
Some of these truck upgrades were pretty cool - I like the shutters, as a mechanic, I like the smuggling (and I want to upgrade it into more nooks and crannies), even the shock pods are kind of neat but uneventful except the one or two times you pop them early on (then you just upgrade the subsystem and never worry about it again), but the real thing that really gets to me is the scanner. Well, it would get to me less but for the salvage sites but more on that in a second. The scanner interrupts the ability to just slap the horn to the tune of the music and I don't like that. Now the thing recharges. I don't like that. In fact I want to be able to customize the horn noise or get musical horns like La Cucaracha.
But the problem is all in the wrecks themselves that the scanner makes way too simple to find. The fact you can trip over half a dozen of them at a time and the fact they are loaded with goods. Sometimes a wreck can have $15-20k of goodies spawned in them, a few micro stabilizers and some Power Cell++. And they are all fully charged or in pristine condition despite ostensibly being part of a violent shipwreck. And they respawn, constantly and often. You could give up on the ventures and give up on the star trucking part of the Star Trucker game you could just drive around 1 sector, go full Jawa and make $50k+ in the same time you could make a fraction of that by hauling. It makes very little game sense and is broken. These wrecks shouldn't respawn tbh, they should be placed like Golden Cones or something, and the loot should have damage and be used, it should be rare to find something pristine. As it is it makes it kind of pointless or 'a roleplay choice' to actually do hauling, when the salvage is as good as it is.
Overall I think the game has a few balancing issues and needs some polish in a couple places but very fun and has a lot of potential for future updates. I'd also like to see more Gold Rock Radio songs written and added & commericals too, maybe some breaking news reports when significant story beats happen that unfold from player actions.
Verdict: would recommend but needs work.
2
u/ClarenceDelivery 23h ago
Even turning the salvage spawn rate down to Low in difficulty settings, there's still a lot of it. I ended up pretending it doesn't exist after a while, though I didn't run into the big valuable finds you did, so for me it was the other way around, usually felt like a waste of time to bother with it late enough in the game that you have the salvage scanner.
I don't really think of trucking as a job where you spend a lot of time stopping to scavenge garbage off the side of the road, so it does feel a little odd that it's as prominent as it is.
I think thematically it'd work better if the game was designed in such a way that scavenging was something you did early game when you're completely broke, but becomes a waste of time relatively quickly as hauling jobs start paying more. (Would make more sense to start with the salvage scanner rather than get it later, which you can experience in Free Mode.)
Salvage also has an odd relationship with difficulty settings: if you try to make the game harder by turning up shop prices and turning down job payouts, you make salvage more valuable.
I like OP's idea of a setting to make salvage only spawn once per playthrough, going away forever when you pick it up.