Where ATS shines brightest is when you've finally accumulated enough cash to buy your own garage and build out your own fleet. Do you want to be a master of transporting hazardous and explosive materials? Or will you concentrate on long-distance runs and fuel economy? These early hours can be a bit of a grind, but they serve to teach you the game's mechanics, systems, and get you familiar with the rules of the road.
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The initial hours of American Truck Simulator find you as a lonely driver for hire, slowly building up your stockpile of cash and improving your skills, which become increasingly valuable as the game progresses. I'm also impressed with the traffic AI! They wait at intersections, stop at red lights, and I was shocked to see a few cars decelerate when I flicked my turn signal, allowing me to slip into the left lane. (Though, I prefer my curated Spotify playlist.) The game captures that intoxicating feeling of the perfect roadtrip, especially when complimented by the game's included selection of live or internet radio stations. Prior to writing this review, I struggled to articulate exactly why I enjoyed driving these long stretches, with or without complications, and finally realized it's simply the wonderful sensation of the open road. Having lived in and driven through these areas (I grew up in Fresno and currently live near Las Vegas), I'm impressed with the amount of detail and beauty that's been injected into these virtual environments. Or watching crop dusters fly over tall green fields in California's central valley. Or seeing San Diego's beautiful coastline come into view at dawn. Though not a perfect facsimile of California and Nevada, the developers have nevertheless created a pretty photorealistic representation of the highways, byways, and memorable landscapes of these states. There's something cathartic about driving through the dusty deserts of Nevada at dusk, seeing tumbleweeds dance across the road and smacking into Joshua trees, participating in the ebb and flow of the highway. That trip wasn't the most serene - and it certainly wasn't boring - but others were strangely hypnotic. Now I was only clearing $2000 from this $4600 job, less the added cost of repairs and fuel. I sighed, downshifted, and set my cruise control, crossing my fingers that I'd make the remainder of this haul without incident.ġ0 miles later, though, my vision went black, and a single terrifying word appeared in white text on the screen: " dozing." I panicked and accidentally swerved left, ramming a car into the shoulder and instantly losing another $1600 from my profits. I should have kept a closer watch on my mirrors.
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Unfortunately the highway patrol was out in full force and I was slapped with a $1000 speeding ticket, which was instantly deducted from my bank account. I shifted up to 14th gear, dismissing the 55MPH speed limit. Suddenly, my vision darkened around the corners and I realized I was in trouble. Time was my nemesis, and the more deliveries I squeezed into my schedule, the more I inched from the red back into the black.
I'd just taken out a hefty $500,000 loan to buy my second Peterbilt 579, hire on an additional driver specializing in explosive cargo, and build an expansion for a new garage in Las Vegas. Common sense urged me to find a rest stop and snooze for a few hours, but time had become my enemy. I'd been on the road for hours, and had foolishly disregarded my persistent yawns. My assumptions were obliterated a few hours into my playthrough of American Truck Simulator.ĭuring one of my many adventures, I was traveling down the I-5 South at about 1 a.m with an excavator on my lowboy, only about 30 miles from my destination in the coastal town of Carlsbad, CA.
Sheer curiosity landed it in my review queue, and I also wanted something new to test with my Logitech G920 Racing Wheel besides Project Cars and Dirt Rally. My assumption was that spending hours driving cargo across lonely stretches of highway would be, well, supremely boring. Possibly like you, I largely ignored Euro Truck Simulator 2, despite its growing, enthusiastic fanbase and its 3.5 million copies sold (yes, really).
Yet I've been hopelessly addicted to American Truck Simulator. And I certainly don't wake up fantasizing about hauling 20 tons of fertilizer from Las Vegas to Fresno. I gravitate toward escapism or fantasy in my video game experiences, not realistic and sometimes monotonous recreations of the real world. It's not a knock against the genre, I'm just not wired that way.
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