RATING:

Pros: Quality graphics, sleek layout and design, a true strategy.
Cons: Slow-paced, performance lag, tedious content and a boring theme.

Graphics: 8
Performance: 6
Gameplay: 6

Overall: 6.5

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Last week we took a little extra time to check out the newest title from Bright Future/ Travian Games, Truck Nation, these companies are also behind the similar themed MMO strategy Rail Nation that you may have previously seen. This free to play browser-based MMO, also available on mobile devices, focuses on players running a trucking company where they are in charge of hiring truck drivers, purchasing various trucks and trailers and setting up jobs for their employees to transport all manner of goods from one city to another across realistic maps of Germany or Europe.

We spent a few hours getting to grips with the game for a deeper insight and checking out any available features to get an idea of just what was on offer with the game. As ever with these types of games it can be quite difficult to do as extensive a review as we would like, particularly with some of the latest features as progression is very slow and steady as is the nature of this type of strategy.

So our first thoughts were pretty much "this is a game that revolves around delivering items", not exactly one that had us chomping at the bit and dying to play to be honest, whilst the trucking simulator genre seems to be thriving we can help but feel that the managerial side of running a logistics company is going to be for a very niche player and in all honesty sounded quite dull.

Once we stepped into the game we were comforted slightly by the polished graphics and illustrated characters, the game definitely looks decent and it was clear that the simple and intuitive design had definitely had mobile platform in mind. With some decent music that really suited the tone of the game we were conceding that perhaps we had judged too quickly. Then we got into the tutorial. Now we fully accept that games that have a lot of features open to players require a more detailed tutorial and whilst they did try to add a splash of humour to the proceedings, it did feel like quite the information overload. Talking stats, facts and figures to a backdrop of grey and steel windows started to crank up the boring factor and muscling through the tutorial actually a chore and once we were on the other side of it already it felt like we didn't want to carry on.

Creating our character as part of the process allowed us to choose our starting city, heading to the European map we started in Liverpool, the closest available city to where we live, and as ever with these types of games where our home city is an option it was actually very low population in comparison to some of the capital's and other areas. As the developers and publishing team are German the game does have a lot more support for the German community, with an entire map of Germany for one of the worlds and German localisation, so it was a massive surprise to see the English community little on the sparse side due to the European map being released after the German map.

Pretty much as soon as we joined we were invited to join a player Association, in the game players as individuals can try to acquire Prestige, the main criteria for positioning individual players on the leaderboard, however players can also join an Association and try to acquire Victory points. These two avenues of gameplay we actually really liked, for those that want to go solo then they have the option and can still put their mark on the world, but those who like cooperative gameplay can group up with 24 other players to form an Association, which offers extra Association buildings/boosts and allows players to compete against rival Associations and the "The Corporation" AI faction to try and take over territory. One of the things that we enjoy about Truck Nation and many of the other games that Travian Games publish are the real objective focused gameplay and actual win conditions; gameplay is broken up into multiple Rounds, each lasting 12 weeks and players/Associations can win a Round, which then resets everything; much more preferable than an endless slog at the top of the leaderboard fighting for the top spots forever.

Due to the member restrictions of an Association we declined the invite as we wouldn’t be playing long enough to contribute and wouldn't gain any real instant benefits with the amount of time we were playing. This is pretty much a common recurrence with the game, the pace is very slow requiring the acquisition of resources (dollars, Platinum premium currency and Research Points) to spend as well at the time scale factor where actions take minutes, hours and sometimes days to complete. For us this meant logging in, performing the available actions and then logging out because there was nothing else we could do for a while; the game is casual but requires a constant involvement from players if they wish to be competitive/ successful.

So what actions could we take? Well primarily we had to take on jobs, starting out we could only take jobs from Liverpool and its neighbouring cities (though the developers simply gave these cities a "Liverpool" prefix then added "North", "East", "South", "South East", etc. depending on the direction from the main city as opposed to giving them the names of real-world nearby cities/towns). As you level up you get the chance to unlock other cities that you can travel to for jobs, which will help bring in extra cash, but expanding from your original home town takes time and a lot of effort. Jobs consist of transporting goods, whether hazardous chemicals, food, people or anything else you can imagine, with around 100 different types of goods available including both legal and illegal goods. As a player we had to hire our own drivers to take on jobs, supply them with trucks and the appropriate trailers to carry different goods, each job would list the required trailer and the type of driving licence a driver will require to take the job. Job in hand drivers would travel back and forth bringing in cash, keeping an eye on the best jobs in a city and trying to create an efficient system where drivers could haul back goods between two cities was ideal.

One of the things we did like about the drivers is that each has their own stats, determining how long they can drive for before needing a break (important for doing long cross country deliveries) as well as other stats such as their Risk Tolerance. We were entirely sure what this meant put given that you can deliver illegal goods for a whole lot of cash that it may revolve around getting drivers on your books that are prepared to deliver such items if you want to focus on the more shady side of the transport industry. With risks comes reward but also punishment, albeit we didn’t see it as a challenge that players can be stopped by police, caught in speed traps and also fall victim to load inspectors, all of which can put points on an individual driver’s license and give him a ban. Again, the content progression was too slow for us to witness this kind of thing, and more the pity as it might have kept our interest.

We were disappointed with two of the primary features in the game; the Research Tree and the Truck Depot. The Depot is the buildings that players have access to on their lot of land, giving boosters to features and a steady income of various resources the system was once again quite dull and simply allow players to upgrade one building at a time to increase the output of that individual building; it was an extremely basic system. The Research Tree was also extremely linear, by spending Research Points we could unlock new trucks and upgrades for each individual truck, but there was little deviation into what trucks you could get access to and in which order.

All in all whilst the game wasn't really our kind of thing; slow paced strategy aside it was more because the general theme and presentation, which whilst looking impressive, was actually quite boring. It was a little too simple, a little too repetitive and a little too slow to get into for all is, combined with some real performance issues that slowed the game down when we have multiple windows open; that said looking at the German server population it seems to be good enough for thousands of other players.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2015 at 1:22 pm and is filed under MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Puedes dejar una respuesta, o un trackback desde tu sitio web.