Truck sims and space sims offer almost entirely different experiences, one focusing on long, relaxing drives and the other demanding mastery over a complex ship that could hurtle into the heart of a star if you mess up badly enough. But often when I play space sims, I wish they could take a bit more of the meditative approach of their driving counterparts, and I’ve found myself spending hours just making deliveries in Elite: Dangerous as a result. Now, a new Xbox Game Pass release finally combines the best parts of both of those niche genres — and as it turns out, being a long-haul trucker in the depths of space is anything but relaxing.
Despite its sci-fi setting, Star Trucker has far more in common with Euro Truck Simulator than games like No Man’s Sky. You start the game not in a typical spaceship, but in a spacefaring semi truck, complete with a mobile radio. After setting your rig right following a breakdown, you’re free to take on jobs hauling cargo through the vast emptiness of space, while taking frequent breaks to keep your truck in working order and chatting with fellow truckers running their routes. Space trucking is a lonely job, but banter from other pilots is great at livening things up. One of the first conversations you have is with a trucker who warns you about an oxygen leak by saying you’re “leaking lung juice,” which instantly endeared me to them for the rest of the game.
While Star Trucker is far from a hardcore space sim, flying extraterrestrial big rigs is no easy task. It is, in fact, incredibly complicated, and reading through a huge instruction manual conveniently stored in the glove box is a near necessity to avoid crashing and burning almost as soon as you set out. Your ship controls more or less like the kind of truck with its wheels firmly on the ground (with the addition of moving on a vertical axis), but it’s still a spaceship, after all, and so it takes a lot more than changing the oil and rotating the tires to keep it running.
Star Trucker is as much about proper maintenance as it is about soaring through space. Every system in your truck runs on constantly draining power cells, which you absolutely don’t want to dry up. Deplete your gravity generator’s battery, and everything in your cab will start floating through the air, causing untold amounts of damage. Let your magnetic hitch run out of power and your cargo might just go tumbling through space, never to be seen again. As you might imagine, oxygen is the most crucial resource in Star Trucker, and you probably already know what happens when you’re out of that. While you’re keeping an eye on your batteries, you also need to be on the lookout for hull breaches, which require a little emergency spacewalk to fix.
And, listen, there will be a lot of hull breaches. Part of that is just the nature of living in outer space. It’s absolutely lousy with asteroids out there, and just one space rock pinging off your windshield is a cause for major concern. You can mostly avoid them by sticking to designated shipping lanes, but there you need to worry about staying under the speed limit and not crashing into other trucks, so it’s not a guaranteed safer way to travel.
The other reason you’re definitely going to get a hull breach or 20 now and then is that piloting in Star Trucker is hard. Just think about it: you’re flying an enormous craft with a load of fragile cargo attached to the back, in an environment where your momentum continues forever if you don’t stop it. It feels very different from driving a terrestrial truck, as sharp turns and slammed brakes almost always results in chaos as several tons of metal are suddenly asked to halt their movement. More than once while playing, I found myself hopelessly spinning in circles after attempting what I thought would be a simple three-point turn or trying to swing into position to pick up cargo.
Star Trucker might not be nearly as chill as its ground-based counterparts, but with enough practice, it does start to feel less like an exercise in masochism. Learning the intricacies of controlling your big rig and mastering the art of spaceship maintenance are equally compelling, and once you’ve got them down, Star Trucker does become a much more relaxing experience, even if it does confirm that I’m not cut out to drive anything too big to fit in a compact parking space.
