Star Trucker, Raw Fury’s answer to what Euro Truck Simulator might look like in the year 3000, is now a year old, and has celebrated that fact with an update that finally lets you whip out your wheel and pedals.
Ever since I gave it a go with a controller prior to letting my Game Pass subscription crumble into dust, this is a day I’ve yearned for. After all, what good are truck sims, be they Euro, American or something more Snowrunnery, if you’re not operating the controls of your great metal haulage beast by flicking flappy gearbox paddles, or sawing away at a circle clearly designed for something a bit sportier?
That’s what this anniversary update for the interstellar hauler delivers, with wheels like the Thrustmaster T128 and flight sticks like VKB’s Gladiator NXT EVO being early additions to the devs’ handy tracking sheet of tested peripherals. There’s also a guide and FAQ rundown from Raw Fury to help folks get their hardware up, running, and fully bound to all the inputs space trucking requires.
Gear recognised by the game should set itself up with default bindings automatically, but I usually find creating my own basic set of essential buttons not that time-consuming, as long as the game wants to acknowledge your wheel exists. Just remember to bind a pause button, and stick the handbrake somewhere your finger can easily hold it when you want to see if your rig can finish a delivery with a 10/10 skid.
As a counterweight to all the wheel and pedal lorry mischief I planned the minute I clocked this update, it also comes with new speed checks. Yep, cameras, fines, the works. These camera checkpoints along the trails of the galaxy will even show you what speed you’re doing as you pass them, though the notes don’t mention if you get shown a little smiley face for not blasting through a Jupiter school zone at 120mph. You can also disable these checks via the settings, if the threat of having to attend a speeding course with the crowd from the Mos Eisley cantina is just too much.
Aside from that, there are a couple of updates to trailers, and a couple of optional truck goodies to commemorate the game’s first birthday. The latter includes a hologrammatic image of a cake you can display in your cab. Just remember to eat plenty before your next long haul.
If you’ve not given Star Trucker a go, our Nic dubbed it “a game that’s much more about the ‘trucker’ of it all than the stars, but the trucker of it all really does shine” in his review, writing:
When you exit the airlock to patch up hull breaches, little white spanner icons mark the offending damage. The symbol that marks the airlock to return to your truck is a home. I noticed it early, and then I kept noticing it. The more I did, the more perfect it felt.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to oversteer that home into an asteroid belt.
