Scania Truck Driving Simulator: The Game

The Good
This is a single player, timed driving game where the player earns points but it's not a racing game, it's actually about driving and driving well.

I was impressed with the game's content and how easy it was to get started. It is tough to 'do it right' and there's no easy/medium/hard difficulty setting but in this game that's OK. Everything can be played and replayed as often as you want and not everyone wants to get the perfect score.
The Driving Licence challenges are really the way the game handles a tutorial. These start out with simple tasks and rapidly, or so it seems to a non driver, become more complex. For those who drive in the real world, or just those with more experience in this kind of game, I guess it would be a reasonable learning curve.
The Driving Competition section was unexpected as I'd not considered truck driving to be a spectator sport, I'd heard of truck racing but precision driving is new to me. I enjoyed trying some of the tight courses that simulate a competition even though I made a mess of every one I tried because they felt realistic.
The Freeform Driving was interesting. The first time I played it I was presented with scenarios that were generally out in the country and my first challenge was to take a trailer of stones from a quarry to a building site and park them in the designated area. The second time I played this section I started in the docks and had multiple accidents negotiating the yard before I even got onto the road, the third time was in an inner city at night with dual carriageways and night time traffic to deal with. As with the Dangerous Drive scenarios it was like driving a 12m brick through an obstacle course but here the game's design impressed me because the challenges felt and looked realistic rather than an artificial situations created just for the purpose of the game.

The controls are simple. Sixteen action keys to drive the truck, operate lights, indicators, wipers etc; eight keys to switch the camera position plus another that cycles through all cameras, and another eight that attach/detach the trailer, customise the display, take screenshots and turn on the radio. All keys can be reassigned and the game supports keyboard only, keyboard ad mouse or keyboard/controller combinations so the controls should suit everyone. I used keyboard to do the driving and the mouse to look left/right at junctions and the scenery and it worked very well indeed.

Graphically the game impressed me too. True I played on the highest graphic setting the game allowed but I thought the scenery was very good. It wasn't just the grand vistas of the countryside that impressed it was the cityscape with it's traffic and dual carriageways, functioning traffic lights, pedestrians and office buildings illuminated at night. In the countryside it was the little things that stood out for me, the cattle grazing in the fields, the shadow of trees on the long grass and the cracks in the road. True some of the trees looked a bit artificial, in places the flowers were regimented, and on some steep mountainsides the grass seemed to grow horizontally but in general this was a pleasure to look at.

As far as the sound goes I've no idea what a Scania R-series truck sounds like but the trucks did sound realistic. In the Gallery section there's a video showing how the sounds were captured so I'm pretty confident that what is heard in the game is close to the real thing.
In-game there's decent music that only plays when the game's menu screens are in use. During the game there's no in-game music but on the game's website there are instructions on how to edit one of the game's config files to enable streaming radio within the game. I tried this and got it to work and getting a live traffic update while playing the game did add a certain something, though it would have been better if I'd been driving on real roads. Players can also play their own music by copying files in mp3 format into the game's music folder I also tried this and it worked just fine.

When the game was released players could post their scores on-line and compare their skill with others. Their is an in-game option to download and display these scores so the player can rank themselves compared to the best. This would have been great when the game first came out but now all the scores on the leader board seem pretty much unbeatable.

The Bad
I found nothing to dislike or rant about with this game, what follows are a few observations such as

• I liked the fact that you could drive on the left or the right as we do here in the UK, however this only affected gameplay in the driver's cab so when driving in the challenges and on the roads of the Freeform section traffic was on the wrong side of the road for me.
• When Freeform Driving there's a map in the lower left of the screen which shows where loads are to be collected. Once collected a black and white chequered ball appears on the map showing where the load is to be delivered... except it doesn't. What it shows is the general direction of the drop off point which initially will be somewhere off the map and this makes it hard to plan the easiest route.
• A level or a challenge scores something like 300 points and completing a level unlocks later levels, this is standard for a lot of games and isn't a problem. I completed a challenge with over 5000 penalty points and thus got a zero score yet this still unlocked later levels. I was grateful for this but still a little surprised and some gamers may prefer that later levels are only unlocked if a positive score is achieved. Having said that the player can always repeat the level until they get a positive score.
• Though I flattened traffic cones and scraped along walls and other obstacles neither the truck nor the trailer showed any signs of damage nor was the handling impaired. I don't recall an in-game configuration option to turn this on/off so I'm assuming that this just doesn't happen. Again, not a problem for me but for those wanting absolute realism, or the extra flush of satisfaction that comes from completing a challenge without a scratch, this may be a disappointment.
• Playing on the high resolution did stutter when playing some of the challenges. This happened the first time I played the game and as I'd not used the computer for a week it's possible some housekeeping was going on or downloads were being installed. I had no such problems when I played the game the following day.

The Bottom Line
The emphasis in this game is good driving, it's not a racing or an arcade game. It is possible to jump in and just play it but to get the most from the game it's important to spend time practicing the manoeuvres and understanding just how the trailer will react around tight corners and especially when reversing.

This game requires an activation code so if you're buying it second hand make sure the manual is present otherwise you won't be able to play it.

There's a set of modding tools available on the game's web site together with references to game mods and command-line flags. It's not something I'm interested in and there doesn't seem to be many mods available on the internet but if that's what you like it's available.