Truck World: Australia - First Haul (PC)

Half of my love for the land down under is almost entirely based on old Billy Connolly travel programs, but also the idea of the road trains. Like any raging psychopath with a love for trucking in games, there are parts of Euro and American Truck Sim that are skimmed over when it comes to the simulation, though. That’s fine, not every game needs to be Eve Online levels of boring, but much like Alaskan Road Truckers a couple of years back, I’ve been keeping an eye on Truck World Studio’s Truck World: Australia for a while now. A trucking sim about getting out of the cab to do the work.

Set in “the heart of Australia,” which sounds like a tagline from a Visit Australia ad in the UK from the 2000s, you’ll take on big-rig trucking in one of the most hostile places on the planet. See, maps might distort this a bit, but Australia is 1, very big; and 2, going to kill you. If rocks, snakes, spiders, and Pauline Hanson aren’t big enough threats to your life, the fact that the sun is approximately three inches from your face during the day and stopping in the Outback will see you die, there’s enough threat to make existence a nightmare. Nonetheless, trucking through that, dust storms, and everything else, it’s horrible.

Without a release date yet and a new demo out now for Truck World: Australia, titled First Haul, I thought I’d have a look and maybe give my opinion on it. As I say, the major difference between SCS’ offerings and Truck World Studio’s upcoming title is the insistence on getting out, connecting the cables to the trailer, and lifting the legs that keep the trailer up. It’s a simple thing, but it makes the idea of trucking feel a bit fuller in concept. The First Haul demo covers what is basically your first job for a trucking company, taking a trailer to a mine somewhere in the outback.

At about 40-50 minutes of an offering here, I will admit that I did spend a bit more time with Truck World: Australia’s demo than I probably should have had. The first time I loaded the demo up, I didn’t have my wheel and pedals set up properly, and I just wanted to have a quick check of what was on offer, thinking a controller would be supported well enough to give it a try. Well, using the PS5 Controller for whatever reason wouldn’t move the character for love nor money.

I won’t go into a rant about 25-30 minutes of a struggle there, but I can say using a keyboard and mouse isn’t entirely fun, and you should let Truck World: Australia do its setup wizard thing with your wheel when it asks to. As I say, you’re actually allowed to run around in this world in a first-person view, that’s fine. Performance-wise and visually, I think there is more to be done by Truck World Studio, or maybe the DLSS settings that are active by default are a bit too high. Shadows, for whatever reason, have that weird DLSS dithered look around the edges.

Truck World: Australia looks fine, it fits the setting just fine, it is just when you start picking at it that you can start saying “Well, this could be better, that could be better,” and so on. What we have to go on so far is fine, but we’ve no idea how much of a sample size that is of the final product. The gameplay is what we’re mostly here for, and well, it is also quite fine. What I will say is that no matter what, you’re always going to compare Truck World: Australia to 18 Wheels of Steel all the way up to SCS’ more recent Euro and American Truck Simulator.

In comparison to those, yeah Truck World: Australia is a little lighter, it doesn’t have that weight of the trailer behind those long sweeping turns you take at a speed resembling Tokyo Drift. For me, as I struggled to feel the force feedback, something just didn’t feel as though the wheels were stuck to the road, but rather gliding across. It is a demo, the game is still in active development, and we’ve still not got a release date. I can’t honestly expect everything to be perfect just yet. That’s certainly something I’d like to see more of and see it improve over time.

The UI/UX is another thing that felt limited, though. For the three people that don’t know, that is user interface and user experience, and while Truck World: Australia has a fine set of tools to tell you the gear you’re in, the speed, the map, you can find the damage, which indicators are on, if diff-lock is active, if the parking brake is active, how much damage parts have, and all of that. However, one thing this demo doesn’t have is an indication of how far away the floating waypoint marker is, or even how far the delivery is.

For this demo, you are delivering to the Dusty Ridge Mine in Ingomar, South Australia, which isn’t the center of the Outback, but it is part of the South Australian section of the Outback. Of course, I’m going to compare it, but what Euro Truck and American Truck Sim does is tell you the miles left on the UI map as well as the ETA of how long until you arrive. Now, in the delivery info, Truck World: Australia does give you an expected time of delivery, but while driving, you’re at a loss for how far you have left.

In the case of this demo, it is, of course, truncated, but the delivery is supposed to be from Darwin to Ingomar, which is like driving from New York to Salt Lake City. I assume this is to “hint” at the size that Truck World Studio is aiming the game to be, rather than a representation of the actual journey. I don’t need a floating bit of text over waypoint markers, as we’ll get to here in a second, but something to tell me as the player how much of the journey is left would be nice.

One thing that’s notable about the demo, however, is that you are talking back and forth with the company dispatcher. She’ll give you updates on the road conditions ahead or some sort of side missions along the way. I don’t want to say that it’s an emergent system that will randomly pop up, as the demo is fairly scripted (almost too much), but a little over halfway to Ingomar, you’ll be told of a roadblock as someone ran their road train into a ditch. It isn’t the three or four trailer behemoths you’ll see in videos that amaze Americans, but it is certainly two that are blocking the road.

Basically, you are told, “Go park your trailer up here, go back and pick up these two, take them over here, head back for your trailer, and get on your way.” It is a simple thing, but it is a fun little detour that will break up that nearly 2,500-mile journey from the northern coast, down the Stuart Highway, and heading down to Adelaide. As an idea, instead of literal detours miles out of the way (again Euro/American Truck Sim), I quite like it.

Truck World: Australia might be a while off as of yet, but what Truck World Studio and publisher HypeTrain Digital have shown off, I’m excited to get the eventual release down the line. Ultimately, it is a nice little vertical slice of gameplay, and that’s the point of a demo. It is promising and exciting to see other developers explore this idea of trucking in more interesting places, and generally, there is something special about this type of trucking. I do have my misgivings here or there, but generally speaking, Truck World: Australia is the most exciting upcoming trucking sim around.