Some of this darkness could be attributed to the fact that I had no idea there was a light switch to be turned on inside the truck, nor did the benevolent Carol ever direct me to do so, while I was fixated on trying to cut tomatoes which kept disappearing from my grip, glitching into nothing.Albert Einstein reportedly said that if he had an hour to solve a problem, he’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions. The truck interior where you work in the first stretches of the game is not just scrappy and in want of a little improvement, it is dark and depressing, made more so by the grim narration. The food you struggle to put together should be the reward for this fussy, slow procedure – however, it does not look delicious.
To be effective, simulation needs to capture delight as well as frustration. But it really needs to feel like play, instead of work – and therein lies the risk of the real world simulator. Now, arguably, because this isn’t a work of delightful escapism but a realistic simulator, the frustrating movement issues could be considered part of the challenge. All of this could have led to delightful chaos, but instead everything feels laboured and sluggish. There are temperature issues to be taken into consideration. There is not only ingredient management to be taken into account, there are expiration dates and storage solutions. The cooking is very procedural, but not satisfying: the first-person burger, pizza, sushi assembly is sloppy. Recipe for frustration … Food Truck Simulator. The driving of the truck from location to location is unsteady and occasionally glitches jarringly: with a little more polish this could have been a delightful mechanic.
Coupled with the realistic graphics – which had the potential to be impressive – it’s a little like running a burger truck in some unnamed drag of Grand Theft Auto’s Los Santos. Our protagonist inherits the titular food truck after the death of his father, and receives guidance from an almost-maternal figure called Carol, who talks you through a long and humourless introduction.
Food Truck Simulator, however, before it even presents us with glitchy technical issues, has a strangely heavy tone. Other cooking-themed titles such as Overcooked, or the long running Cooking Mama series, have a high-paced spirit, undercut with silliness or charm. Food Truck Simulator, from the title alone, seems as if it should be a riot. There are few thing more frustrating than playing a broken game: perhaps only playing a broken game with a promising premise.
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