We use the word ‘fubbish’ a lot in our house. It’s mostly used for movies, but it’s a great word for things that are objectively rubbish, but fun regardless. Pretty much anything with Jason Statham in is fubbish. Nicolas Cage, too. We don’t often use it for games, yet it’s the perfect word to describe Speed Truck Racing.
Speed Truck Racing is, by all sensible criteria, a very bad game. It can’t decide whether it’s an arcade or simulation racer, and often changes its mind halfway through a track. The best way to take a turn is often to hurtle towards it at full speed and bounce off. There’s one, solitary track, and the designers try to hide it by clipping off corners here and there. It should, by rights, be getting a score that’s equal to the number of tracks it includes.
But the thing is, we got a real kick out of Speed Truck Racing. We’ve got very little to defend ourselves; we imagine virtually every other reviewer has damned it. But it’s fubbish. We learned all of the quirks of playing it, mastered them, and became Speed Truck Racing standard-bearers. Those skills aren’t transferable – no other racing game plays like this – but we had a heck of a time learning them.
Imagine this for a moment: you have a track that feels like NASCAR for roughly half of it, with tarmaced straights that have you hurtling along at breakneck speeds. Now, imagine that, suddenly, the track pivots into muddy turns, and now you’re playing DIRT. You’re pumping the brakes, ensuring that you don’t over-accelerate for fear of sliding into a wall. The speed drops to an eighth of what it was before, and you can move up the rankings simply by staying on the track.
The shift from arcade racing to rally simulation gave us whiplash. We hated it at first, with a big old capital H. But once we started adapting, changing like an Autobot from F1 to rally car, we began notching victories. And it felt really rather satisfying.
Taking corners is nothing like we’ve ever played. On the Daytona bits, you are either lifting your finger off the accelerator or tapping the brake to keep on the track. But if you over-tap the brake, your car goes literally sideways. We’re not sure how physics comes into play here, but you are perpendicular to the track, and that becomes a problem if you’re trying to pass cars or hit ramps without spinning.
Taking the finger off the accelerator sends you a little sideways, but not as much, so you soon learn to rely on it more. And the only way to ‘right’ yourself is not to steer or oversteer, but to stay in a straight line so that Speed Truck Racing does it for you. That makes no sense, clearly, but it means that you have to aim for the racing line and then let go of the analogue stick, hoping that you’re facing forward by the time you hit the next corner. It’s weird and broken, but there is skill involved in it. Once you understand what gonzo version of racing they’re sticking to, then you can get good at it.
Cornering on the dirt tracks, though, is another beast. There’s no drifting here: you are instead slowing to a near total stop as, for some reason, the best handling comes from when you’re still. Hairpin corners become a test of whether you can stop on a dime and then pivot round to accelerate ahead. If you can perform this strange maneuver, you can race away from your rival and win with ease. Again, there’s a modicum of difficulty to it, so it becomes its own little challenge.
The tracks, though, are harder to defend. Speed Truck Racing has just one, and that track is sliced and diced to become variants on the same theme. A NASCAR long-corner is chopped up so that you have to come inside the track and do some muddy hairpins. It’s fooling nobody, and it leads to bouts of familiarity as the game’s cups and time trials all feel vaguely similar to each other. Why Speed Truck Racing couldn’t have come up with a few different layouts – SEGA Rally often gets the mickey taken for only having three, for example – we don’t know, and the result is the odd feeling of fatigue.
But we will fight Speed Truck Racing’s corner. It’s glorious fubbish. We finally finished Speed Truck Racing and stood on top of the podium spraying a big bottle of 1000 Gamerscore, and we regretted nothing about the experience.
Come to Speed Truck Racing with expectations of it functioning like normal cars, or feeling like a conventional arcade or simulation racer, and you will be plenty disappointed. It feels like a racing game created by someone who never got behind the wheel of a car, let alone played another racing game. We wondered if its designers were on a different kind of ‘speed’.
But treat Speed Truck Racing like a puzzle to be solved – a new take on driving – and there’s fun to be had here. It’s not going to be for everyone, not by a long shot, but we felt like Speed Truck Racing was £8.39 well spent.
