Hard Truck 2: King of the Road

Played this years ago and I'm happy they're made a Windows 10 compaible version. I think it's a nice ballance between simulation and arcade. You have various truck upgrades, tyre wear and realistic fuel consumption, you can even coast with the engine off if you're out of fuel but you're going downhil. I like that you can go offroad unlke another popular truck sim and if you do you'll find the hidden shortcuts. One annoying thing though is the AI and "physics". Cars changing lanes when you approach and blocking you and as soon as you stray over the middle of the road the AI goes straight on the other side of the road ( annoying on narrow roads). If you a car slightly bumps the side of your trailer it'll just block you and cause your trailer to detach and send you flying.

I've loved this game ever since I first got the original disc release back in...2002? I forget what year, but trucking along and avoiding land mines and mafia and police with guns was a riot. The soundtrack was awesome, later I discovered a Russian metal band named Aria was responsible for the soundtrack. It's instrumental copies of their music and creates a wonderful lone-wolf feeling in the game as you travel from one small town to the next, delivering cargo. Amonst the trees and between towns there are bridges, shorelines, rivers and hidden paths available to explore and find low priced vehicles and cargo in the middle of nowhere. Finding a map of hidden roads online will help you run to Greystone quickly and get a hefty reward, easily beating your competition truckers. This version, on simulation, so far is void of mafia and land mines, so I'm hoping arcade has that, but I'll have to edit my review after I play more to find out. Currently a few hours in I've hired two drivers and yet to get blown up, but cops DO deploy spike strips and they are just as detrimental to the truck. The fallback of this game is it's physics system with collisions, so you'll have PLENTY of incentive to NOT HIT ANYTHING. Save often, and if you flip the truck or get stuck onto another vehicle or obstacle (trash bins can render your truck undrivable) you can reload without calling 911 and wasting 1-2k. Even with all the glitchy fallbacks, this is a solid game, with good gameplay mechanics, realistic yet basic necessities like repairs, upgrades, hiring, and fueling trucks. You can use cheats to make things easier if you find yourself getting KO'd too often. Enjoy the ride and the fun camera angles as you rock out to Aria and race the competition on the highway. I'm playing this on a windows 11 gaming laptop, RTX 4070 and i9 CPU in a MSI GE68 HX 13V. Thanks to GOG for providing a copy of this game that just works! (patch included was NOT needed yet, mild glitching only so far

Good old memories

Fantastic game

Awesome game i had as a kid. Still amazingly fun.