Maroc - 3RD-STRIKE.COM - A La Une - 10/Aug 04:00

Food Truck Simulator (Switch) – Review

After our disappointing stint as a construction worker in Construction Simulator 4, it was time for a career change. Enter Food Truck Simulator, the latest simulator game to be ported to consoles by Ultimate Games. The game debuted on PC in 2022, and we took a look at the PC version. It didn’t quite impress us back then, but perhaps a year or two in the oven was what Food Truck Simulator needed, right? Well, not really. Porting the game to consoles has turned out to be a recipe for disaster. Read on to find out why this is one dish you’d better pass on. Story There is a story present in Food Truck Simulator but it won’t be winning any prizes for originality. You step into the shoes of the aptly named Player, whose father used to be the respected owner of a food truck. The old man passed away, and you have inherited the family business. Now, we are immediately faced with a massive plot hole, because for how much of a food truck legend your father was supposed to be, the truck he left you is the most basic and barebones piece of crap. This makes sense from a gameplay perspective because the entire point of a sim game like this is that you go from rags to riches, but some more effort could have been put into fleshing out the backstory. Graphics We’ve seen our fair share of bad graphics on the Switch, and we can confidently say that Food Truck Simulator is up there with the worst of them. The lighting is god-awful, with unnatural colors. Environments look bland and empty. The draw distance is atrocious. The movement of “human” character models is unnatural and janky. We can go on and on, but perhaps the worst offender is simply that in-game text is literally illegible. Take a look at the screenshot below, for example. See those pixels on the right monitor? That’s supposed to be a list of ingredients that you’ll need to read to figure out what to put on that $100 Cheese Bacon Burger. Now, from what we understand, the Switch version was subject to a massive visual downgrade compared to the PC version, and it’s possible that the PS4 and Xbox One ports didn’t suffer the same fate. If that is the case though, Ultimate Games should have skipped the Switch version altogether instead of releasing the undercooked version we got. Sound To Food Truck Simulator’s credit, the one element that the game gets right is its audio. The music is pleasant, and the sound effects are adequate, from the hum of your truck to the sizzling of burgers and bacon on your grill. There’s even an in-game radio so that you can select your favorite music by flipping through the radio channels. As if that wasn’t enough, Food Truck Simulator features honest-to-goodness voice acting. An above-average soundscape isn’t going to do enough heavy lifting to redeem Food Truck Simulator, but the effort that was put in does warrant mentioning. Gameplay Simulator games tend to be hit-or-miss affairs, and unfortunately, Food Truck Simulator is a miss. It’s a shame because we can definitely get behind the game’s concept, and we could even see ourselves enjoying it had the execution been better. The general idea delivers exactly what you’d expect: you’ll be cooking food, managing your inventory, maintaining your truck, and driving from location to location. There are other food trucks that you’ll be competing with to claim your place at the top of the food truck food chain (food truck chain?). It’s not the most outlandish concept in the world, but as far as sim games go, the simplest ideas often bring the most enjoyable results. It’s when it comes to the general execution that things start to fall apart, at least in the console version. The inventory was clearly designed to be navigated with a mouse and keyboard. Navigating it with a controller is awkward and laggy, and we often found ourselves exiting menus entirely as we inadvertently pressed buttons multiple times because the game didn’t seem to respond. Outside of the menus, moving our player around a first-person perspective felt inaccurate and janky. Driving the truck was even worse: acceleration felt needlessly slow and steering was unresponsive. Fortunately, there don’t seem to be any traffic rules or consequences in the world of Food Truck Simulator. As you navigate the mostly empty streets of the city you can run red lights or bump into objects, and your truck won’t take any damage, nor will you get fined. Cooking food is frustrating, rather than fun, mostly because controlling your character feels more like a physics challenge than something you’d put thought into. Once again, it appears to be a matter of this being a mouse-and-keyboard title first and foremost. We wouldn’t be able to tell you how long Food Truck Simulator is, because every minute we spent in the game felt like a waste of time. We never even got around to making pizza or sushi, so we can’t confirm whether the sushi mini-game bug our fellow reviewer mentioned in the PC review ever got fixed. We took a look at the game’s overall Steam score for comparison’s sake, and the PC version is still considered mediocre at best, two years after release. DRAGO Entertainment should have had plenty of time to iron out the kinks, but it seems like they didn’t bother to do so. It shouldn’t be a surprise then that the Switch port, and by extension the PS4 and Xbox One versions, are outright awful. Asking €19.99 for as buggy and unfinished of a product that Food Truck Simulator is, is frankly insulting. You’re much better off spending that amount on food at an actual food truck: you’ll get a more enjoyable and realistic experience out of that, and eating the food will take longer than the time before you’d become frustrated and simply give up on playing Food Truck Simulator. Conclusion From the awful controls to the atrocious visuals and the nonsensical “story”, we can’t imagine anyone giving Food Truck Simulator a shot and then thinking “Yeah, I’m having a good time”. The game’s only remotely passable element is the soundscape, and even that is just adequate. Steer clear of this one.