Truck Mechanic is the sim you abandon by the side of the road

Living In Sim is our monthly column about simulation games, and the frequently stupid misadventures they inspire.

I like to test the boundaries of a world, and today I will do so by getting my truck into fifth gear and soaring off a bridge into a river. "Your truck has been destroyed," says a game over screen, bringing a sense of mild relief now that I cannot hear all the heinous gobshites on a walkie talkie who I have quickly grown to hate. I had such high hopes for my inaugural simulator in this much-hyped column, but here I am fully and apologetically sodden in the wet pits of a Latin American waterway. There are some car crashes that simply cannot be repaired. Truck Mechanic: Dangerous Paths is one of them.

It's a straightforward premise: all the simple pleasures of unscrewing wheel bolts and calipers in Car Mechanic Simulator 2021, but with the added terror of doing so on the edge of a deep ravine. Instead of working on bits of other people's cars in a garage for cash, you are now maintaining a single vehicle of your own, taking it screeching and sputtering across a South American landscape as you drive between repairman odd jobs or haul cargo between work sites. 

Sometimes you'll have to place planks of wood over small gaps as makeshift bridges, or use a winch to heave yourself up a hill. I once lived in Central America for almost two years of my actual, physical meat life, and let me tell you that the roads were not so easily conquerable. I could tell you terrifying things about the Costa Rican countryside and the many insects that live there. But now's not the time. There's something wrong with my pretend wheel.

I hop out of the truck, perhaps only an hour or so into exploring the open landscape of the game's first zone. I am faced with both a rockslide blocking the path, and a wheel that is uncooperative for reasons I have to figure out. At this early point, Truck Mechanic feels familiar but faintly promising. As in Car Mechanic Simulator, you have to zoom-in-ishly inspect your motor's bits and pluck parts off one by one as they become highlighted in green. You unscrew and prybar, getting deeper and deeper into layers of machinery, until you hit upon a broken piece that needs to be replaced or fixed. The vehicle is recreated with loving accuracy.

So in I go, peeling back the many skins of this metal banana in search of the rot. Under the locking ring, beneath the trunnion nut washer, below the cylindrical roller bearing - all components I definitely knew before writing them just now - until I find what I'm looking for. Aha! That's yer problem right there. It's a small wrecked spring inside the wheel's brake jaw. It's completely ruined, and by that I mean it says "0%" when you hover over the part in the menu. I'll have to find some way to fix it. Good thing I carry around an entire anvil in my pocket.

Lots can be fixed with this anvil, which you can plop down anywhere with the inexplicable power of King Kong moving an entire phone booth as a chess piece. You approach this fixin' station and repair car parts there using the anvil's embedded wrench-twistin' minigame. I fix the spring, put the wheel back together, and finally lug the huge boulders of landslide out of my truck's way one by one, with exactly the type of tyrannical strength you'd expect from a man who carries 300 lbs of iron in his jeans.

I carry on towards my destination - a gondola station on a volcanic mountainside that I've been told needs a handyman. But let us not ignore the openness of this world, I think. Let's explore a little. I detour to a gas station to fill up the tank, where I find spare parts hidden behind a wire fence, and a big floodlight that needs repairing. 

More fixin' minigames make themselves known. A soldering iron lets you play a tiny game of circuit board Operation to fix electrical gizmos like the big broken light. And your truck is full of other tools - wire cutters for getting through that fence, a gas cannister for storing backup petrol. The systems emerging here are simple, but I often like this in a job sim. They offer a conglomeration of many simple tasks which, when mooshed together, accumulate into a meditative mini career.

Unfortunately, I am about to meet one of the Truck Mechanic's many joysappers - its "people". As I drive up onto the next hill I finally run into another human. It is my contact in this world, a rubber-faced man in a poncho called James who is habitually shaking one leg, then the other, then back to leg number 1, and so on. Imagine a cat who has walked in cold soup, and cannot kick the bits of onion off his back paws no matter how hard he tries.

Except unlike a cat, James is not adorable - he is a plastic freak. When I try to strike up a conversation, he is reluctant. "I'm working here," he says with the lifeless tone of a text-to-speech program for Windows XP. "No time to talk." He shakes his right leg. He shakes his left leg. I watch him do this for some time. He does no work. I rob the spare parts from his shack and leave.

Under many circumstances, I will forgive or ignore dummy-looking, generic NPCs. But here they exist as not just a physical reminder of low budget silliness, but an audible deterrent to contented repairmanship. The voices of your mission-givers pester you over the radio as you drive, and the player character has his own gruff, unfunny patter. Imagine David Hayter, but deeply illiterate. 

Making radio dialogue a part of a sim, or any game, can work wonders for adding some character and depth to the world. But not here. Any chatter between characters sounds like two aliens from a distant galaxy have been told what "banter" is and they think they are good at it. The script should be prosecuted and the voice actors given heavy fines. Nothing about this game benefits from being heavily story-driven. Many mechanic sims are blissful in their sense of solitude - nothing but a wrench and maybe the voices of your favourite podcast for company. Truck Mechanic asks the question: what if we pierced that solitude with a man delivering poor jokes at random from a limp text document with the jarring cadence of a child learning to read. 

I grit my teeth and carry on towards a hill in the distance, my objective marked on the map. I try to at least enjoy the scenery. But even here there is trouble. I won't get into the nuts and bolts of how this game has been optimised for different PC hardware but the choppiness and general ugliness is evident at every muddy corner. The approach to lighting is particularly awful, sometimes automatically blasting machinery with an overpowered flashlight such that you can no longer see the fusebox components you're trying to remove. Sometimes tinting your truck's windshield with the aggressive UV filter of an overzealous pair of ski goggles, to the point that you can't see in broad daylight and need to put the headlights on. The Unreal Engine has been abused in some extreme ways here. Or else Unreal Engine has abused the game developers. It's hard to tell sometimes.

I finally reach the gondola I've been driving towards, but it's out of service because the control box needs a new wire. You see the running theme. If there is a worldview shared by the designers of Truck Mechanic and by successive US presidents, it is that everything in South America is broken and only you can fix it.

After getting the gondola moving, I ride to the top of the neighbouring volcano, where I fix another fusebox at a research station. The protagonist briefly interjects with a line about the volcano he is standing on, and the crappiness of the game fades for a moment. I feel on the verge of some other sensation, perhaps a feeling of freedom or discovery. If I push a little further up this hill, will I find the mouth of the volcano? Will I unveil new wonders and sights? Will I --

I hit an invisible wall after three steps.

And it's all downhill from here, literally and figuratively, as I ride the gondola back to my truck, drive back into the valley, and run over a sheep on the way home.

I now understand enough to know what this game is. Truck Mechanic is not Car Mechanic Simulator on the open road - it is an impoverished Roadcraft. The moments when you break down on your way from A to B are the best, the shoddy open world melting away to the simple acts of heavy lifting, unscrewing lug nuts, and repairing rusty radiator fans. In these brief episodes I become faintly engrossed. The "Truck Mechanic" part of the game is therefore mildly dependable. It's the "Dangerous Paths" bit that dissolves into an irreparable mess. 

Fixing your vehicle as you explore an open world is a beautiful fantasy. One perhaps served better in games like Jalopy or the Long Drive or Drive Beyond Horizons, all games I now wish I had played for this column's first entry instead of taking a wild punt on a materially ugly and shonkily optimized semi-jungle where people speak with the uncanny emptiness of crash test dummies brought to life.

So let me hastily quit my truck mechanic job and move on. I'll leave the keys to this sad, grubby vehicle with Diego here in the big hat.