Published by UltimateGames and developed by DRAGO Entertainment, Food Truck Simulator is a simulation game that attempts to put players into the shoes of running a food truck business. The game is available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC.

Players take control of an unnamed protagonist whose father was a well-respected food truck operator. After his passing, he decides to take over and keep the business going. The truck may have grown old, but it has become a cornerstone of the family’s legacy. The game aims to help players experience the joys, challenges, trials, and tribulations of the food truck industry.

On top of cooking orders and serving customers, players will also be maintaining their trucks, driving to each location, and facing challenges from rival businesses along the way. The game starts in the office of your garage where the truck is held, and you can freely explore on foot from a first-person perspective. Here is where players will get an early preview of what to expect later in the game from updating the decal of the truck, repairing damages, replacing tyres, installing new kitchen appliances, and more. It feels odd that a lot of updating/maintaining the truck is done from the PC in the office, not by walking up to the truck. Sometimes it’s also unclear how to add the new things to the truck, constantly having to remember to go to the PC in the office, which ironically looks more like a Mac. After learning the basics of updating and maintaining the truck, it’s time to hit the road.

Players will be put in the driver’s seat and can head to the next location or can just explore the town at their leisure, although it’s not all that exciting. Being a food truck simulation game, it makes sense to add a driving segment, but it’s the most mundane and boring part of the game. You can listen to the radio with a few different stations to choose from with different music genres, but it doesn’t add much. There don’t seem to be any traffic rules either, as players can just run red lights and crash into other cars with no consequences. There are some collectibles to find around town, but players will likely just want to get to the next destination and get to work.

After reaching the destination, it’s time to set up and start serving customers. This is where the real fun begins. First players need to set up the kitchen by installing/replacing the gas tank and switch on the stovetop, deep fryer, pizza oven, take out the sauce bottles and more, then it’s time to cook. The orders will be displayed above the kitchen bench with the ingredients listed and how much they want their meat cooked. Players will have to grab each ingredient from the fridge or shelf (which looks more like a drawer) and try their best with their time management skills. They can do things in any order they want, but it’s recommended to put the meats and buns on first and allow them to cook/toast, while players prepare the other ingredients such as slicing buns and tomatoes.

An indicator helps you see where you’re cutting each ingredient and meters are displayed above each meat or bun on the stove top, so players check their individual progress. Players can also do more than one order if they can handle it. It can be overwhelming having to keep track of everything, but that’s how the hospitality industry is and it’s part of the fun, although there are quite a few things that negatively affect the experience.

There’s only so much space on the bench and you can’t stack ingredients on top of each other such as tomatoes and buns, and the same goes for the chopping board. If there are still tomato slices on the board, you won’t be able to use them to cut the buns. Instead of moving the tomatoes to the side, you must move them one slice at a time, which gets irritating. A big part of cooking fast food is preparing the ingredients beforehand by having containers of sliced tomatoes, onions, buns, and more ready to use, but here you have to do everything most inconveniently, while things are busy, and customers are waiting for their orders. If customers’ expectations are not met due to your mistakes and making them wait too long, it leads to less or no money being made and bad reviews.

Adding to that, there are also some odd design choices such as the large gas cylinder running out so fast, when they can last so much longer, most times for the entire duration of your shift. Having to replace it while you’re already under a lot of pressure is the last thing you’d want to deal with.

It’s also amusing that multiple large gas cylinders can be inside a drawer (or a shelf as they call it) and that it can fit inside a rubbish bag to dispose of an empty one, even though in real life, you would get them refilled. Overall, serving customers and preparing their orders is still the most fun part of the game and definitely has potential, but there is so much going against it.

The game is also riddled with glitches which can be hilarious to watch such as sending your truck flying into the air or getting frustrated when trying to navigate the menu screens and nothing seems to respond. In my personal experience, I had a lot of trouble just trying to do basic tasks such as choosing my next destination on the map or selecting to install the deep fryer in the truck, when nothing was being highlighted and nothing responded to me pressing random buttons. Closing the game and going back into it seemed to be the only way to fix the issue, but occasionally I would have to do it again later.

For a PlayStation 4 and Xbox One game, the graphics look very outdated, like 20 years out of date, feeling like it was made for the PlayStation 2 or original Xbox console. When driving around town, there are a lot of texture pop-ins and invisible environments further off in the distance, that appear slowly as you get closer. While serving customers, you can see their faces up close and they are not the most pleasant to look at, with their eyes wide open, no facial expressions, and stiff animations.

Simulation games based on real-life jobs seem to be the latest trend, but the majority just feel rushed, unfinished, and not living up to their full potential and Food Truck Simulator is not much different. The most fun part is serving customers and preparing their orders and could have done without anything else. The game is riddled with glitches, preparing food comes with a lot of inconvenience, and the graphics are severely out of date. Food Truck Simulator serves up a lot of potential but falls short on the order.

Written by: Sammy Hanson