Developed by Kyodai and published by SOEDESCO, Truck Driver: The American Dream is a truck driving simulator in which you get to live the American life. SOEDESCO is no stranger to trucking games, and its experience in this genre dates back to 2019 with the release of the original Truck Driver. What started as a trucking game on consoles has grown into a full franchise with multiple titles and platforms under its belt. Truck Driver: The American Dream is the latest PC release of this franchise, and it is built on SOEDESCO’s years of experience making trucking games. This is our review of the PC Steam release of Truck Driver: The American Dream, in which we drive a big rig and live through a narrative while trying to build our trucking career.
In Truck Driver: The American Dream, you play as Nathan, who takes over his father’s trucking company, and along with his father’s friend, Clint, he must turn it around and make it profitable. The game is a proper narrative title with around 31 chapters of its main story, told through small cutscenes between missions. The game kicks off with us driving as Nathan’s father through a deadly storm and then picks up the story later, where Nathan takes over the truck. The game does have a strong start as it tries to show its visuals, trucking mechanics, and the type of extremities we can expect from the game, down the lane.
The missions are exactly what you would expect from a trucking game. You go to point A, pick a load, and then drop it off. During the missions, you have to look after yourself by resting and eating food; otherwise, you will fall asleep on the job and end up suffering losses. This keeps things interesting, and when compared to other trucking games like European Truck Simulator 2, Truck Driver: The American Dream certainly takes the lead on this one. Throughout the map, there are multiple rest areas or diners where you can rest during your journeys.
The game introduces multiple characters throughout the story, but they seem to do little in the overall experience apart from making an appearance in a cutscene. The narrative is nothing too out of the ordinary, but it feels in place for the game. However, I am not a fan of how the game delivers this narrative to the player. What appears as a hand-painted picture with voiceovers, the narrative fails to provide any value addition to the game. It is certainly a bonus point for the game, and having a truck simulator game with a proper narrative is definitely going to be appealing for players who feel lost with European Truck Simulator 2’s open-world, sandbox gameplay. Still, the implementation could have been a lot better than this.
Probably the weakest bit of the game is its driving mechanics and controls. While the game suggests I pick up a controller, it is much better to drive it with a keyboard and mouse because the lag is just unbearable with a controller. I did not try the game with my wheel because, based on what I saw with the controller, I did not bother setting it up for it. The driving was bearable with the keyboard and mouse, but compared to its competition, it just fails miserably.
The trucks feel extremely slow, and they drive like they are stuck in a gear. For some reason, I had no engine sound in my truck, which made it difficult to know when to change the gears. The game also uses a digital tachometer, and it kept bouncing up and down randomly, and sometimes the gear would change, sometimes not. The speed is unbearably slow for the first few gears, and then it would pick up suddenly. I don’t want my truck to drive like a NASCAR vehicle, but this is a game, and it shouldn’t feel this laggy that a player starts to think that something is wrong with the truck. If you finally manage to gain some speed, stopping the truck is another nightmare as it just refuses to do so.
Turning the truck on slow speeds is fine, but while cruising on the highway, it just starts to wobble because you are unable to bring the wheel back to the middle at the right time since there is no sensitivity setting. As you drive on the roads, you have to abide by the traffic rules. Running stop signs, hitting civilians, or ignoring red lights will result in fines. The AI vehicles on the road tend to honk their horns a lot as well, as though we are somehow offending them by driving our slow trucks in front of them. There were different instances where I was either turning onto a smaller road or just driving on the road when a car would come behind me and start honking repeatedly. I am not sure if this is by design or a glitch, but the AI cars feel like bullies.
At times, I felt as though the game was out of sync with itself. I felt this the most during the second mission of the game, where I was tasked with going to a resting area and taking some time to freshen up. What surprised me was that there was not a single resting area in the main city, and I had to drive all the way out on the main highway to access it. Naturally, I ran out of stamina, and guess what, I was back inside the city at a gas station, on the completely wrong side of the city. While driving already feels like a chore in the game, I had to do it again because somehow, the game decided that I should run out of stamina in a narrative mission where the game is about to introduce me to this very mechanic.
This leads into the visual design of the game. I liked the truck designs, and the map feels big as well. The game world is designed pretty well, and I enjoyed the variety of scenery it offered. The problem comes when it comes to the visual fidelity of the game. Despite using Unreal Engine, the game fails to look good. The shadows are dark, and the details of objects, roads, and the trees do not feel like a modern game at all. There is a strange blur at all times, which becomes prominent during the cutscenes. The same goes for the audio design of the game. Random noises are loud, and the ones you would actually want to hear are low.
Truck Driver: The American Dream tries to achieve a lot at the same time, but it definitely needed more time in development. It requires a lot of optimization at this point, and the gameplay fails to attract towards itself. The visuals lack in quality as well, despite the game using one of the best engines out there, which is known for visual fidelity. I emphasize optimization and visual fidelity so much because I ran the game on a PC equipped with an RTX 4070, 32 GB of RAM, and an Intel Core i7 processor. These are fairly decent specs for a PC, and it should not perform so badly on it. I have completed God of War Ragnarok with around 40 frames on this PC, and that game is really demanding when it comes to visuals.
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Final Verdict:
Truck Driver: The American Dream has potential, but it needs more time in development, especially when it comes to visual and performance optimization. Despite the right tools, the game fails to deliver on nearly every aspect, and this should not be the case. Under all of this, there is still an enjoyable element with some solid mechanics in place, but until the developers put in a little more time in it and make it perform better, I cannot recommend the game at this point. It has a lot of good going on for it, but the bad simply overshadows it. If you still want to try it in its current condition, the PC Steam version is now available.
Final Score: 6.5/10
Disclaimer: A PC Steam review code for Truck Driver: The American Dream was provided by SOEDESCO for this review through Game.Press. For a detailed breakdown of our scoring and review process, please refer to our Review Policy.
