Alaskan Road Truckers – Review

We’ve had a few Truck simulators on Xbox, but few have lived up to the pedigree of the infamous Euro Truck Simulator 2. Even after over 10 years the PC great is still the milestone for pretty much every Truck sim that releases, and while consoles always seem to be a long way off with “On the Road” the best of the bunch, which was then passed by Truck Driver thanks to some great post-launch improvements since it arrived and the recent release of Truck and Logistics Simulator not only winning the award for most convoluted name, but also the alleged best Truck sim on Xbox, but we all know Snowrunner is the only real competition, which took trucks (and all manner of other vehicles) offroad across various terrains where the challenge was the elements and not just a clock.

So here we are in the peak of British Summertime (That means it’s about 2 degrees warmer than March) and we’ve now got Alaska Road Truckers which promises to bring us freezing temperatures and more than your average truck sim.

Alaskan Road Truckers starts off with selecting your character…
while there’s no explanation to what the Heat or Cold symbol mean next to two of them,
one thing I was expecting with the Alaskan Roads was as much survival as Trucking so I avoided any large coats or skimpy outfits, customisation options are super-lite, so I set about jumping in my truck and connecting the trailer before a short journey to complete my first job.

It’s not long before you see the difference between this and most Truck Sims, rather than the controller being an extension of the truck, with mediocre tasks such as refuelling down to a tap of the button, with Alaskan Road Truckers, there’s a greater sense of realism, firstly you’ll need to manually release the supports before you can go anywhere, as well as connecting the cables from your cab to the truck, That petrol task extends beyond a button tap and instead you need to jump out your cab, select the required fuel amount and then pick up the nozzle and start fuelling yourself.

Many of these tasks, as well as keeping warm and fed as you progress further through the game, start to feel a little mundane, with a game like Snowrunner where you actually feel alone in the wild, survival elements would feel a little more substantial, but with Alaskan Road Truckers, the closest house or petrol Station are never too far away, which makes the survival elements feel a little anti-climactic and pointless.

Moving to the actual Trucking side of the game, and it’s not bad, but It all just felt a little too basic, steering feels super responsive, in the cab the camera flicks back and forth as you make minor steering adjustments, but it’s the overall game world which just feels a little primitive, the map is pretty small in the grand scheme of things and any journey from A to B barely manages to throw up more than a few interesting areas, and while AI vehicles are probably intentionally sparse, it’s never really quiet enough that you feel isolated, or busy enough where the challenge becomes actual driving.
Instead you follow a flurry of quests which are only really broken up by the survival style minigames such as tackling that petrol pump.

It’s hard to be too critical, because I do appreciate the new direction and trying to do something fresh with the genre, but it ends up a jack-of-all-trucks, rather than excelling as a driving, delivery, or survival simulator and ends up with a mediocre truck sim, that’s never allowed to get moving because of the survival elements.

Another area that’s a little lacklustre are the graphics, I’ve never been to Alaska myself, but games have taught me there’s a lot of trees, but with Alaskan Road Truckers, they’re nearly all identical, as are the distant mountains you’ll never reach, the roads and the other vehicles, which leaves one area to the next feeling a little too familiar, only broken up by a random building which usually houses a new job you can tackle if you have the right license.

As much as I love various simulation games, I really struggled to immerse myself with Alaskan Road Truckers, and every time I was starting to “get into it” it was broken up by the survival elements and suddenly feeling hungry, this was made worse by small bugs, such as getting out of the truck before turning off the ignition, inexplicably left me unable to turn around with my right analogue stick.

Another area which I didn’t feel helped was the overall realism, in order to portray long journeys (or just a poor attempt to make the map seem bigger), my chosen unit of measurement was Miles per hour, so cruising along at 54mph, you’d imagine 50 miles might take you an hour, or in many game worlds maybe as little as 5-6 minutes, but watching my journey countdown, it took about 5 seconds to travel 3 in-game miles, which works out at a blistering speed of 2,160mph, (that’s about 3 times the speed of sound).
Call me a geek, but even thinking about a truck travelling that fast left me with all sorts of questions about whether Amazon would need drones, and definitely what my next Alaskan Truck stop might be.

As much as I want to praise Alaskan Road Truckers, there’s just too much competition even at the low price of just under £22, Truck Driver is the best established and that’s available at £26, and Truck and Logistics Simulator, while not as well established is newer and often touted as the best truck simulator game on Xbox (£25).
Sadly, there’s just not enough quality in the survival elements to consider Alaskan Road Truckers as anything other than a trucking simulator, but anyone wanting more of a fight against the elements should keep their feet firmly in the Alaska found in Snowrunner.

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