Hard Truck: Apocalypse Preview

I feel a confession is in order. I’m not a fan of RPGs. Quite the contrary; actually, I’ve been heard to badmouth the genre as a whole more than once to more than one person. I believe my summation of World of Warcraft and the like was something along the lines of “go here to find an item to go there to trade the item so you can level up and find the new item that you need for the item that you have to have to fight so-and-so to find…” and so on. However, with Hard Truck: Apocalypse I figured I’d give it a shot and let the chips fall where they may. I’m glad I did.

While Hard Truck: Apocalypse certainly has the buying and trading elements that you’ve come to expect with the RPG genre, I found myself at my computer around 3am calculating how much sleep I could get by on the next day if I put only another hour or so into the current mission that I was in the middle of.

Hard Truck: Apocalypse is a vehicle based third-person RPG set in a post apocalyptic world filled with hostile mercenaries and the wreckage of a formerly productive society. Your heavy truck is your only lifeline and hope of staying alive. You must learn to fight, trade, and drive in order to live longer than a day or two. (Borrowing, of course, from the “Mad Max” movies that made Mel Gibson the star he is today.) Your truck will take damage if you get too involved in the scenery and plunge over a cliff, or if you face off foolishly against one too many bandits at a time without having the firepower to back it up. A quick stop in a local town and the repair shop will usually set things right however, provided you haven’t made enemies with the faction that happens to control it.

In the limited demo that I received, my initial bounty hunter mission was to find and eliminate a dangerous criminal, for a fee of course. (How the hell else are you supposed to buy something to trade later?) However, not long into the mission you’re sabotaged through mysterious means and your truck--along with all of its weapons--is taken from you. Forced to start over from scratch, you find yourself at the mercy of a mysterious local man who takes you in and agrees to provide you with a dingy vehicle to get you back on your feet again. The rest of the demo is spent looking for ways to upgrade your truck and trying to figure out who exactly it was that attacked you, and why.

While the graphics aren’t going to win any awards what with Black and White 2 and Civilization IV setting the pace currently in that area, they still aren’t horrible. The whole thing has a slightly fuzzy and out-of-focus dreamy quality to it, and the lighting is soft and decently done. The amount of sunlight changes based upon what time of day it happens to be. At night, you’ll be wise to use your headlights to get around as it genuinely gets difficult to see without them. However, the daylight only seemed to shift when I was stopping at towns and giving the map a chance to reload. The landscape is also well done with trees, shrubs and grasses littering the entirety of the map. Some of the smaller shrubs you can drive right through, but larger trees require some careful navigation as you can knock them over, but not without damage to your vehicle.

The controls took a little getting used to, but once familiar, seemed to be laid out very well. Controlling your truck with the asdw keys and the camera/guns with the mouse allows you to drive and look around at your environment at the same time.  While roaming around, you can either blaze your own trail and hope for the best or stick to the mapped out roads. I had equal amounts of fun attempting to do both.

Buka Entertainment, the Russian company most recently in the news for agreeing to release Valve’s catalogue behind the former Iron Curtain, is the distributor behind Hard Truck: Apocalypse with the developer Targem Games being the workhorse that churned it out. Having taken a few years of Russian as well as being a born and bred American, it’s obvious that the writers weren’t native English speakers and there is some “All your base are belong to us” moments that caused me to chuckle a few times.

Language issues and under-developed graphics aside, I had a good time getting to know this game and learning the ins and outs of RPG again. Perhaps it isn’t all worth the glib sum of a fake economy that I had previously assumed. The real question however, will be to see how this game stacks up against Auto Assault a new up-and-coming MMORPG vehicle based game with many similar elements to Hard Truck: Apocalypse. Both of the games take an existing (and tired,) genre and expand on it in new and interesting ways. No matter how you slice it, you still get a fresh piece of the gaming pie and something entertaining enough to keep you busy for some time.