Most of the time you don’t go into a game completely blank. You have read about a game, have seen some footage or the concept of the game has triggered something in your mind. In the case of Freight Simulator, it is the latter. The concept of the game triggered visions of young me playing the games from the “Der Planer” series. A German series focused on running your own transportation business, combined with running the life of your character, the company CEO.
Freight Simulator (New Games Waves) aims to do offer the same experience. You start with some money and you put that money to good use. You buy a garage, put a truck and trailer in it and hire a driver. You then find an interesting contract to carry out and send the driver on it’s way. You can also run the life of your CEO, but thankfully, that can be turned off.
The trucking and shipping is where the game falls flat for me. The realism just isn’t there, the numbers are non-sensical.
Unrealistic Numbers
An example: I sent my truck out to deliver a load of beans. The load is 36 tons. The distance is ca. 800 km. My truck does a whopping 57 km/day, meaning that it takes this truck 11 days to deliver it’s load. That makes no sense at all.
And I wouldn’t even mind the game using it’s own rules in stead of a somewhat realistic range, if it would tell me about it. But it doesn’t. When I go to the concessionaire (which is the dealer where vehicles are sold) I can see only three stats on a truck: its power (how much can it pull), its fuel consumption and its price.
Some testing I have done has revealed to me that more powerful trucks are faster. I get that, but I find it weird that those exist side by side in the same timeframe. It all seems a bit arbitrary to me. Unbalanced.
Not a full release
And that saddens me. Because I believe that this developer made a game out of love for the tycoon genre. He made a game that takes on the transportation sim differently from most others, where the focus is more on creating the infrastructure needed for transportation and a bit less on the actual transporting of goods.
The developer is also very responsive to feedback, so I have hope that the game will improve over time. I have reached out to the developer for some information and will update this article when I have the answers I seek. For now, I can’t really recommend the game, as it feels more Early Access than the full release it claims to be.
