I really enjoyed this game. Providing moving services across the US is an amazing way to spend 1-2 hours a week. No fancy graphics or open world, but damn it's good!
Its aggressive name notwithstanding, Hard Vehicle: 18 Tires of Steel isn't a traditional foot-to-the-floor racer. Unlike most traveling video games, this budget-priced game from ValuSoft will not put you in high-speed wheel-to-wheel duels with the computer-controlled competition. Instead, you must carefully navigate the right path through a semirealistic version of America, picking right up and providing cargo, weighing the risks of available projects against potential money, and finally building an untouchable trucking empire. At some factors, you'll feel compelled to drive at maximum big-rig rates of speed and bend a few guidelines occasionally just to make sure that your payloads get to a timely fashion. But Hard Vehicle is very much a solo trip that emphasizes pickup truck management just as much as it can point-to-point speed. Whether you'll enjoy the game is dependent quite definitely on your affinity for its uncommon concept as well as your ability to look previous several quirks and glitches to start to see the rather intriguing problems that lie underneath.
Although Hard Vehicle isn't exactly children's name on this side of the Atlantic, the game has actually existed in one form or another for quite some time, having originally been developed in the past in 1998 by Russian design studio SoftLab-Nsk. This, the third iteration in the series, is produced jointly by Czech-based SCS Software and America's Sunstorm Interactive (of Deer Hunter fame) and will be seen by veteran Hard Truckers as an extremely different game from prior editions. Whereas previous versions of the game highlighted an action-packed arcade setting and a worrisome amount of vehicular contact, Hard Vehicle: 18 Tires of Steel dispenses with the arcade-style wackiness and only simulation-style authenticity.
When you start your initial assignment, you'll find yourself parked, engine off, in a SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA loading dock, getting ready to grab and haul your first insert to 1 of several metropolitan areas in the American Southwest. This is actually the chosen locale for Hard Truck's "easy" setting. In contrast, the medium level occurs around the Midwest, and the difficulty level runs through the uneven terrain and bad weather of the Rocky Mountains.
Hard Vehicle offers an imposing variety of looking at perspectives, a lot of which you'll want to want to audition immediately. In the first-person cab view, you can view everything that is before you or use your mouse to practically turn your mind laterally to peer out the drivers and passenger windows. The game offers several other camera angles, including right and still left mirrors (which are unfortunately not included in the cab view), an aerial camera position that lets you monitor everything in the immediate vicinity, and a nifty mouse-controlled free-floating external cam that pivots 360 levels around the vehicle.
As is typical of each Hard Truck mission, you'll see lots of trailers, each filled with a given cargo and ready for transport. Large floating community forums show up above each truck, displaying the type and fragility of the cargo, the time allotted for your run, and different other critical details. Normally, remuneration for your time and efforts will vary relative to their relative difficulty. Hauling a load of delicate glassware over a long distance very quickly frame can pay a lot more than trucking a box of clothing on a brief jaunt down the freeway.
If you have the ability to make your delivery, you'll use the resulting salary to boost your bank account, impact necessary fixes, and improve your company's rating. With a much better rating, you'll be offered more-profitable careers. With more-profitable careers, you'll steadily improve and upgrade your vehicle, purchase new trucks, hire new motorists to take care of the extra workload, and, with any good luck, increase your company to obscene proportions.
But Hard Pickup truck has many potholes on the road to success. Most often, the missions' allotted time frames are frightfully tight. In many instances, you will discover yourself disregarding stop symptoms and traffic lights and exceeding velocity limits just to complete a job on time. In so doing, you might incur the wrath of the local regulators and pay a significant penalty. You might try jumping the casual curb just to cut precious mere seconds from a given run, and then see your truck detach and drop to the street. You'll then be required to dial 911 and pay a towing service just to get reattached and remobilized.
And the ones aren't the only potential hazards. Just as in real life, Hard Truck requires its drivers to regularly replenish themselves with a certain amount of rest, or they'll risk nodding off at the steering wheel. To monitor whether you will need sleep, you will need to watch the game's "drive time" readout at the top of the display screen. When the clock reaches zero, which credited to Hard Truck's accelerated time and compressed distances will take place every 20 minutes roughly, your virtual eye will start to close, and the display screen will grow dark. They'll pop open up again in only a second or two, but in the meantime, you may have driven off the street or into another vehicle or roadside abutment. As you continue to drift in and out of sleep, the dark periods grow more frequent, and the potential for accidents increases. Thankfully, you can draw into a motel, a vehicle stop, or perhaps a rest area for some shut-eye, an instantaneous procedure where your only decision is the quantity of sleep you are able. The downside, of course, is that you will have even less time to complete your run once you do get going again.
Soon, you'll recognize that sleep stops, fuel stops, weigh-in halts, and inadvertent law enforcement stops trim seriously into your schedule. Toss in the casual accident--some which occur independently of you but stop the street ahead--and you'll quickly see that you need to take a few dangers just to maintain your company in business. Fortunately, you can always hit the N key to get immediate access to critical company information. How's your rating? How effective are your brand-new drivers? Can you afford to hire a better driver? Are you scored highly enough for an upgraded cargo permit? Are you talented enough to be assigned a higher-paying regular path? The questions are extensive, and in this way, Hard Truck is a very interesting game.
It isn't, however, made for those who like their driving fast and furious. In reality, nearly all gameplay is spent when driving your 18-wheeler, where in fact, the going is often sluggish and sometimes tiresome. From a dead stop, it'll take at least one full minute of real-time to achieve any decent rate. Indeed, first equipment brings you up to all or any of 10mph, and in this game, 10mph feels as though 10mph. Although this is practical, it isn't quite the same experience as traveling a nimble racecar. Furthermore, simply brushing against a guardrail or another vehicle is often enough to grind your vehicle to an entire stop, forcing you to endure that whole acceleration process once more. Curiously, Hard Truck's trucks are affected only marginally, if at all, by steep marks.
Even burning to deliver your goods at a loading dock is a time-consuming affair. Newcomers will certainly jackknife their rig often before they're finally able to direct it into the appropriate stall. Unfortunately, just as much as the game's accelerated clock makes your long-distance runs a little less troublesome, it is your foe at the getting and launching docks, where an hour or more of game time can pass when you simply make an effort to maneuver your rig into its designated dock.
And that is not the only problem you'll encounter. Traffic cops, for example, apparently show up out of nowhere to flag you down for speeding or breaking various other basic guidelines. Yet should you actually see one before he views you, it's likely that he won't even know you're there. We were quite in a position to blow previous cruisers on the freeway, hurtle through red lights and stop signals, and generally commit a variety of atrocities while view entirely of a variety of law enforcement vehicles without a lot as an individual warning.
Among the game's most annoying features is its poor placement of directional signage. Unlike in real life, you will significantly less than three mere seconds and 100 meters to react after an indicator becomes noticeable for the related leave or turnoff. This extremely restricted set of directions, which is obviously designed to make the overall game even more difficult, ends up being more frustrating than challenging. Luckily, Hard Truck will make it fairly easy to find your exact destination by smartly placing corporate and business logos on signposts throughout the close by area once you get nearer to your destination.
Nevertheless, it's difficult to condemn Hard Vehicle predicated on these problems because the overall game also does many things well. Creator SCS Software has included lots of impressive visual and practical perks into the game, the foremost which are its environmental factors. In Hard Pickup truck, you'll experience midday sunlight, early-evening dusk, and midnight blackness, all of which move along and transpose at a compressed but believable speed. You might encounter a rainstorm, in which case you'll be compelled to change on the wipers (two-speed wipers, no less) to clear the windscreen. At higher elevations, snow will fall throughout, and the highway may well be bordered by several feet of the stuff. It generally does not actually gather, but it can be found, often turning a two-lane thoroughfare into a dicey one-lane avenue.
Though definitely not geniuses, the artificially intelligent motorists of Hard Pickup truck are generally good. They'll activate their convert signals to improve lanes, pass only on the left, and generally stay away from your monstrous beast. They'll obey the game's working traffic lighting and draw to an end when they hear the siren of a law enforcement cruiser. Although quite erratic at times, seemingly unacquainted with where they're really going, they only hardly ever exert a negative impact on the overall game.
As you may expect from a budget-priced game, Hard Truck's images leave something to be desired. The game's vehicles are quite boxy and minimally comprehensive. Onscreen informational overlays sport rudimentary fonts and truncated words. Light and textural anomalies--particularly big translucent geometric patterns that waft across the landscape--are common. Crashes are horrifically mundane, without wreckage, no visible damage, no fire and brimstone. Yet if you are a die-hard driver who's seen his talk about lengthy street trips and extended driving stints, the game will sometimes convince you that you're really out there on the open up road.
It's important to notice again that Hard Pickup truck is not a simple game. Although it may appear so initially, when the routes are relatively simple and the drive wall clock isn't intimidating, it will inevitably press both your reflexes as well as your brain as you move into more challenging jobs and elements in all the misfortunes. It's definitely possible to finish up smoothly broke and out of business. Furthermore, things only develop more complex when you've hired other motorists and must monitor the whole company, often while generating your own vehicle.
Hard Vehicle: 18 Tires of Metal is one of those titles that could have benefited tremendously from a larger development budget. A small amount of polish could have added much from what is an interesting but flawed game. Nevertheless, simulation supporters and patient motorists may find a lot to enjoy in this often likable and surprisingly deep game.
Jim Rossignol reports:
''Before now something had kept us unaware of the macho-romanticism of the long-distance truck driver. Now, suddenly, the appeal of the open road strikes us: We've got a big blue truck and a delivery that needs to be in Las Vegas, like, yesterday. There's a whiff of management, but really this is a driving simulator. Not a driving game, in that Grand Theft Auto style, no: a simulator. You pick up your load, you head out on the road. And you drive carefully.''
