Star Trucker review: sci-fi escapism and oil-stained mundanity make for a muscular, purposeful driving sim

Keeping your eyes on the road isn’t easy when the horizon hosts crackling azure nebula; when the voluminous nightglow from the planet below makes even the gargantuan industrial indicators look like so many tiny, twinkling cat eyes. I, a terrestrial chump, cannot help be taken in by it all. But I get the sense all this spacey wonder is just so much unremarkable grease pooling at the rim of a diner plate for my Star Trucker. He’s seen a couple things, that’s for sure. Taken the long way round the spiral arm to slip past security checkpoints and offload cases of booze for off-the-record cash. Seen reduced-to-clear Ginster’s wrappers glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. Hummed that Freebird solo a thousand times while waiting for the traffic to thin out near the shoulder of Orion.

Space driving sim Star Trucker is about that place where brake-fluid soaked mundanity meets sprawling, supernal grandeur. It’s a muscular, well-devised rig, but one I reckon you’ll want to be in a very specific mood to play. To call it ponderous would suggest a lack of purpose, and that’s not quite fair. You can’t make a slight shunt crabwise without feeling every ounce of tonnage, and so every swerve or dip is a deliberate, considered commitment. It’s a game about alternately switching your mind off to relax and jerking into wide-eyed concentration; about leaning leaning back in your seat while keeping one eye on the diagnostics, and never letting the southern-fried licks slinking sweetly from the radio fully distract you from the telltale beeps of a flattening battery or oxygen-draining hull breach.

I learned the hard way. My gravity compensator is out of juice. It’s not a complete 10-42 as bollocks-ups go. My fragile UCC circuits are safely packed away in foam-lined hard cases, but everything else is scattered and floating around my cab. It’s fine. I’ll pull into the local cash n’ carry, buy a new battery, slot it in the GC, and get back on the road.

You can tell a lot about about a space sim from how involved docking is, whether you’re lowering landing gear and lining up your ship in Elite Dangerous, or enjoying a breezy auto-dock cutscene in Rebel Galaxy: Outlaw. The docking maneuver here - the same on you’ll use to hitch cargo - can be tricky to master, but it’s really just about lining your rear up with a maglock, then backing into it without getting too eager and arse-shunting a gaping tear in your rig. To aid you, there’s a dedicated docking camera you can bring up on your cab monitors. Lovely.

Unless, of course, the lack of gravity means there’s a floating battery blocking your view to the monitors. Curses.

This is the other side of the game: a physicality that occasionally veers into stream-friendly chaotic silliness, but is mostly just explored to offer a thorough simulation. There are six switches on your dashboard for separate interior and exterior lights. You’ve got dedicated levers for hitching, jumping through warp gates, and emergency braking. There are flickable switches for browsing through diagnostics and cameras. You’ll manually replace each battery, circuit, and air filter. You’ll whack up the heating when you travel to a colder sector. And, if you decide to veer off the dedicated lanes and eat some debris, you’ll have to pop on your space suit, launch from the airlock, and weld the hull breaches shut yourself.

There’s a certain beers-at-sunset spirit residing in the gears of Space Trucker that makes chasing numeric progress feel almost antithetical. Your cab’s got a lot of doohickeys and plenty of room for supplies, but it’s really populated by whatever thoughts you bring with you - that lovely place where sim meets RPG. If there’s a score counter here, it’s your mileage, and then only because more miles on the clock means more sights, and more stories.

Still, there’s both cash and experience at the end of a job, with penalties for late deliveries, damaged cargo, and traffic violations. What doesn’t get spent on more supplies, you can use to customise and upgrade your truck. Experience unlocks licenses for trickier and riskier jobs, and the more road-hardened you get, the more likely you are to make contact with other truckers through your CB radio. They’ll each have their own quests, letting you flex your steering wheel and thrusters, and learn a bit more about the people you’re sharing pumps with.

It got into my blood, for sure. I found myself deeply concerned about horn etiquette, learning to parse who was honking at me as a greeting and who was blasting insults at me for driving like a careless cockwomble. They might have all been blasting insult at me, now I think about it. Star Trucker often uses your own impatience against you as a difficulty modifier. You can always make a straight shot through a sector, point A to B, but you’ll need to stick to the ‘roads’ if you don’t want to deal with floating debris. Failure cascades, too. Your suit has a separate charge meter for welding hull breaches, so two accidents in a row could easily find you leaking oxygen as you wait for the meter to charge up. On the default difficulty, ‘death’ really just means getting towed to the nearest auto shop and paying a chunk of cash, but there are individual options you can use to tailor the game closer to a brutal survival sim if you’re up for it.

There’s a version of Star Trucker that would have appealed a little more to my own personal fantasist predilections. I want to pick up hitchhikers and get the shits from a bad egg butty and maybe get a bit more hands-on with my rig rather than just replacing batteries and air filters. But there’s so much thought gone into what is here, it feels churlish to focus on what isn’t. You occasionally get pulled aside by authorities for regulation weigh-ins. You can’t actually customise your truck until you hit a certain mileage and your warranty runs out, but hull repairs at garages are free until then. There's not a ton of options for indulging your own criminal ambitions, but you can always throw a few cases of wine in the back to sell, to shore up the fines from your latest accident - as long as you know where the next security checkpoint is.

These and other details make for a game that's much more about the 'trucker' of it all than the stars, but the trucker of it all really does shine. When you exit the airlock to patch up hull breaches, little white spanner icons mark the offending damage. The symbol that marks the airlock to return to your truck is a home. I noticed it early, and then I kept noticing it. The more I did, the more perfect it felt.