IS IT WORTH IT?! | A Review of FIA European Truck Racing Championship in About 3 Minutes!
92A detailed review of FIA European Truck Racing Simulator in about 4 minutes! We make game reviews without the fluff.
FIA European Truck Racing Championship is the officially licensed game from the ETRC and includes all 14 tracks on the real world roster. There’s a total of 45 different trucks and liveries in the game including european trucks like Volvo’s and Scanias aswell as US semi’s by Freightliner and Western star.
Overall the game does well in some areas, but it falls drastically short in others.
I spent most of my time using a racing wheel, the Thrustmaster TS-XW and I didn’t have any trouble getting it set up. The handling and force feedback actually feel pretty good and overall the driving model feels satisfying. I also tried it briefly with an xbox gamepad and I didn’t notice any issues there either.
Graphically it actually looks quite impressive especially in wet conditions. The lighting’s good and the tracks and truck models are accurate and well made. Likewise the sound of the engine both inside and outside the cabin sounds bassy and realistic with the occasional rattle or vibration which adds to the overall immersion and makes you believe you’re driving a 10 ton truck at over 150kph.
The multiplayer scene is very much non-existent so unless you’re part of an online racing league or have friends willing to play it with you then racing against AI in singleplayer is your only option which is where the game unfortunately starts to fall apart.
The main feature of singleplayer is the career mode where you take part in a virtual version of the European Truck Racing Championship, but through a combination of strange design choices they’ve managed to make it an extremely boring and unrewarding experience.
For your first season you’re only able to join race weekends as a drop-in driver racing for other teams before being able to join your own team which let’s you try out the different trucks available in the game but also gets boring pretty quickly, especially when you consider that an in-game race weekend is an extremely long and over-complicated affair.
Each weekend begins with a practice session to let you put in some laps and learn the track. After that you head into qualifying which involves 12 drivers completing a hot lap to decide which driver is the fastest. Out of those 12 drivers, the top 10 fastest progress to what’s called the super-pole which is basically just another qualifying session where your fastest time decides your starting position in the first of 2 races.
The first race uses your super pole qualifying time and the second race uses a reverse grid order from the finishing positions in race 1.
The problem though is that the AI drivers don’t offer any real challenge and are in fact completely broken. They cut corners without getting penalties, constantly weave from left to right when driving next to you and they brake far too early for corners and even sometimes in the middle of flat out straights for seemingly unknown reasons.
A couple of times at the nurhburghring they even managed to form a rush hour style traffic jam in the middle of the track, where they were all stuck behind one driver who had just stopped in the middle of the road, and nobody was able to figure out a way around despite there being plenty of room.
Ontop of that, the top speed of the AI trucks seems to be capped at about 10kph less than the player, possibly as some sort of catch-up mechanic or possibly just as a result of bad coding.
I’d describe myself as a mid pack sim racer when it comes to pace, and for me the AI was consistently slower by about 2 seconds per lap which quickly became boring. Starting from the back of the pack I was able to blast past most of them before going into turn 1 and chase down the rest by the end of the first lap even on the hardest difficulty.
Overall the nice visuals and satisfying handling aren’t enough to make this a good game and they must be having a laugh trying to sell it for 39.99 at full price on Steam.
Thanks for watching and we’ll see you next time.
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