Poland-based development team, Drago Entertainment, is back with another addicting title that once you start playing will look back at the clock and hours have passed. Drago Entertainment has dropped some other epic simulator titles such as the famed; ‘Gas Station Simulator’ and ‘Farming Simulator’ which are both again addicting games in their own rights. Their latest title though is ‘Food Truck Simulator’.

You start the story with a cutscene. Your father has just passed away and he owned a successful food truck business. The vehicle and garage have seen better days so you have to make it all look great again and revamp it for future use. You decide to take over the business even with the obstacles that come along with the journey. I love how you have a home base where you can walk around in and inspect the truck. Once you finally get on the road, you need to find a location to set up the food truck and cater to the needs of the pedestrians chasing a fulfilling feed. There is one thing I will mention, Dennis is nasty and deserves whatever is coming to him and his food truck business as a competitor.

There are different stages in the food truck business that you will learn along the way. You start off just cooking burgers at the beginning, then you upgrade to being able to cook fries, and my personal favorite, the pizzas. Sushi though, I could have gone without cooking.

Make sure you have good business management to make sure you have the stock for the hordes of people so you do not have to close up shop early due to not having the correct amount of ingredients. This in turn will cause you to miss out on business and money.

The food is not the only thing that upgrades over time. You have the option to upgrade everything inside of the truck to make your life easier and also get food out quickly. For example, the oven you can upgrade to cook two or more pizzas with a reduced cooking time so you can get the orders out quicker to get more people out the door. There is not too much point in upgrading the main base, it’s more of a cosmetic thing though you can have your own little touch on the place to make it more homely. I waited until I had leveled up higher to even look into upgrading the cosmetic looks as there was nothing that tickled my fancy in that aspect.

Like all good simulators, you need to find a balance between keeping people happy and also keeping the workplace happy. It got to the point that I just started letting things get a little dirtier as there was no sooking coming from the customers when their food was coming out in record times. Each order you get is timed which is not as super stressful as you would think as you get plenty of time to punch the orders out and once you get further into the game as I mentioned earlier, you can upgrade the truck so things like the chip deep fryer to juggle multiple orders making it run a lot smoother and quicker.

I was both pleased and disappointed with the controls in this game. It felt like it would be amazing on the PC with a keyboard and mouse having to try and pick things up quickly as it didn’t work super well with the controller. I found myself having to move my character an awful lot to get that last piece of pepperoni out of the storage shelves. I would also love to see a VR port one day as that would be some awesome fun.

Cutting items with the knife was also slightly difficult with the controller as you needed to keep moving it across and trying to move slowly with the right joystick is not always so simple. The menu U.I. was difficult to use and I felt like it was delayed when clicking RB to scroll through the menu options which I feel could be improved with future updates.

The driving mechanics were fantastic and felt like you were driving a heavier vehicle with the turning acceleration and deceleration. I would have loved to see small things like a reverse beeper be added when reversing but that is just nitpicking little things that don’t matter too much to the overall gameplay but just to increase the immersion into the simulation.

I feel like a broken record with simulator games when it comes to graphics as they always seem to be about three or four years behind. Small things like the population of people walking around the streets or the attention to detail put into the truck would have made this game so good to look at but the character models were something you would have seen from an Xbox 360 game.

The environmental graphics looked alright but could have used some texturing to give them some life. The food models looked great and looked like they had put heaps of work into them but again a little more texture work to utilise the potential of the Xbox Series X.

The sounds in simulators are a little like the graphics, a little lacklustre. There was some upbeat kinda electronic music that would play when you were cooking which amped me up to cook quicker but everything had that generic sound, you got a little sick of hearing after a little while. I loved the voice acting dialogue in the game between a couple of people you meet and some of the customers especially if they were having a sook when you didn’t do their order to their customized needs. You also get environmental sounds of the steak sizzling or the pizza burning in the oven which were good indicators and made you think more ‘Oo no there goes my steak!’ now burnt and in the bin it goes.

If you want a title that is not super polished but something you can sit on for hours and cook food for all the people who want some grub then Food Truck Simulator is designed for you. The developers have got a fantastic idea with this title and it would be great to see the edges polished in future updates. I’ll be keen to see where this title ends up. The main storyline takes about 4 hours to finish and then you unlock free mode. Bon appetit.

Written by: Hayden Nelson