Small-gears Meatloaf

You wanna know if somebody was properly Gen-X? It's growing up with post-nuclear apocalypse media. (Also lead in gasoline, which explains so very very much.) I'm not saying this is a Gen-X game, but I am saying it's just got me dialled right in on a basic level.

Look at any Mad Max kind of thing: there's always some built up freight truck, set with spikes and crazy, primitive guns that shoot molotovs or spears or random garbage. And that's what this game is about: take a freight truck, clap a trailer on it, and build it up with spikes, hillbilly armour, janky guns, and a handful of maniacs to man all the positions. Yeah, there's even a drummer spot. I haven't finished the game so I can't tell you if there's a flaming-guitar player, and this the sort of world where that hyphen is real important. A flaming guitar-player is just as possible.

The game starts you off with a lot of creativity. You will steadily unlock blocks and plates and things and can build up a mini-fortress on your truck. You've also got infrastructure to worry about - a command center for your truck's commander (this gives you map functionality), a medical station (your dudes are gonna get hurt), various guns, firefighting equipment (yes, there will be fires, and how), generators, air compressors, fuel pumps and such as your weapons are rarely self-contained. All this needs protecting.

In the course of a mission, your stuff will get damaged, you'll have to send somebody out to fix things in the field. So good pathing is also key, because every second your compressor is down is another second you're not sending fistfuls of jagged metal at your enemies. Also there's enemy boarders, so getting to them promptly means you don't need to worry about somebody messing up your engine or whatever.

Those goals are kind of contradictory - good pathing vs. good infrastructure and armour. Your space is limited. Your truck can only haul so much weight too, and the more you stack on, the slower you are. It's a rolling fortress so it's not that fast under ideal circumstances, but it's nice to have a truck that can get out of its own way, you know?

The game itself is not a driving game, really, nor is it a shooting game. It's really more of an RTS - you can give directions to your truck, and the driver generally, almost always in fact, obeys them. But not always. Circle there, chase that guy, or drive in this direction. Speed is abstracted, kind of like a warship's cruise/flank/full sort of thing (plus nitro!). Your guys on gun positions will automatically fire at targets in range, and if everything is going well, your job is directing the truck and everything explodes around you.

Your crew have special abilities you can activate as required - some of them only get used a few times per mission (supply requests, damage buffs for instance), so choosing the right time is key. Gunners can be directed to attack specific opponents in range in much the same way, though only about once a minute or so so you can't micromanage them that much. The real micromanagement happens when things start going poorly - you can direct your crew to leave their stations to fix broken items, eject boarders, revive fallen allies, etc. A time-slowy-downy mode means you can do this with relatively little stress.

So, for me, the game is weirdly relatively chill, with the occasional moment of keeping a bunch of plates spinning. The best example: I once leaped my truck off cliff to take a shortcut. Most of my crew were deeply injured and needed reviving, and the engine blew. Staying still for too long gets you eaten by a Dune-grade giant worm... because... you know, reasons. Why not. So I had a frantic moment of trying to get everybody on their feet and things fixed up pronto before we got eaten.

There's a fair bit of customization - you can redo how your crew look, dress them up in absurd armour (which eventually becomes effective over the course of the game), give them whatever names you please. The truck can be painted, logos and such plastered on its flanks, and you can fly your own flag should you please. I've got my Box-Wearing Jaguar for mine because I appreciate absurdity.

Now, all this said, there's a few wrinkles. The driver of your truck generally tries to avoid large obstacles, which doesn't work very well unless you're driving slowly. They will also try to follow roads, which means if you come across one they ignore your directions, which is greatly annoying at times. (Going slowly will let you override this, but not always.) Sometimes the gunners get obsessed with a target they can't hit, ignoring everything else. That's fixable by going into the "WASTE" (manual aim) mode and backing out. It's an annoyance that will surely get patched, and I expect they'll add a "not automatically follow a road" mode in the fullness of time. Mostly, the game feels long.

The game does reward you for wandering, usually with little bits of lore and a book of blueprints for different guns or silly costume bits for your characters. But the truck is not especially fast, even with time acceleration, and there's a LOT of missions. Judging by the map, I think I may be just a bit over halfway into the game, so this might take 60 to 80 hours, depending. I think I could have powered my way through in 50. It feels a trifle long, but I guess if you're sensitive to that cost to time ratio, you'll find it favourable.

I have streamed one bit of a separate playthrough, I may do more. If you've made it down here, you're my kind of person. You'll find me at https://www.twitch.tv/fdejeuner and there's a schedule posted that I strictly follow. I'd like to see you there some time. I will very likely go stream some more in the fullness of time.

Meanwhile, I've got to convince my wife to find her own personal logo, so I can plaster it on my post-apocalyptic road train. I've got a badlands to liberate.

I wanted to like it. The concept of MadMax with crew management is very sound. However, comparing to the company's previous games, a lot of design decisions felt like they were going backwards.

UI/UX: Home base has too many menu layers. When I want to check my vehicle, I have to basically click twice to get where I want. The crew's gear setup is less easy to handle since the overview of body parts always gets hidden when you select it, whereas bomber crew has a better solution. The thing is, there is a list of crew options above same like in the previous games, but the crew gear has a different way of navigating, makes it less consistent and more frustrating.
When interacting with your crew when they are on the vehicle, it's very finicky, so many misclicks are happening, and I also feel like there are just too many clicks for what you want to do while you are driving through the wastes.
Or mission briefings. There are also too many clicks happening.
The fact that you have to hold down TAB to speed up each dialogue window is very annoying. It makes it go so much slower.
The same goes for "hold down action" for confirm. Having that included totally breaks the flow and just wastes your time.

Camera: It is really finicky to work with the camera. I constantly feel my hand is about to cramp, I constantly get agitated. You are fighting against the camera so much. For example: When you tell your driver to drive in a circle, something you do almost all the time, the camera first switches to a terrible position you first have to move out from. All the time.

Driver AI: Each mission I have the issue that the driver suddenly changes direction without me knowing why. Most likely because the driver noticed there is a road and it sort of wants to follow it. Or it's not entirely on the road or the driver things they are close to hitting a rock despite us being totally safe to drive straight ahead forward, they decide to change direction. Occasionally their correction causes the vehicle to slam into a wall or wrecks.
What annoys me more is that you have to hand-hold the driver almost constantly. At times it feels like the game wants you to drive it yourself, but the driving controls are really really bad. It doesn't feel fun to control the vehicles for a long period of time.
Other part that was annoying were the ramming mechanics. Those commands hinder you more than they actually help. At times, it's better to just drive straight or drive in circles. Trying to ram an enemy feels incredibly difficult. And when it happens, it's underwhelming.

Physics: Usually not really important at all in these kind of games... but when the car jumps too high due to an odd bump in the terrain or due to a wreck your driver suddenly decided to steer towards to, then it will take damage.

Game Fun: After finishing the tutorial, I wasn't eager to start the first real mission. Driving distances are so long, it is boring. That's a big issue, that you have to drive and do nothing for so long, yet having to annoyingly control and make sure your vehicle is still in track.
I pushed myself through to play several more missions. Atmosphere and story are quite low. The vehicle looks and feels super weak. And after 4h of playing, there was no notable upgrades or changes. The first upgrade is barely anything. Why are the wheels so incredibly tiny? Maybe to show how week the player is for the first few missions. But after 4h and still no change? It feels pathetic. Or it feels like the game is stretched out super thin to artificially increase game time.
And yet, when battle happens, it feels very chaotic. You have to keep check of so many things. Not because it feels complicated, it's mainly because of the driving and the several misclicks that are happening when trying to coordinate your crew.
Of those 4h of playing, what urked me as well, were the constant time wasting. Loading times. Long driving distance where you can't quickly do something in the background while it's going in that direction, and the rather boring side quests you find in the middle of the road, etc.
Another negative point visually was the fact that the bases' gates were enormous. Gigantic. Yet, your tiny car comes driving out of it. At times jumping out of it due to the wonky physics. For a few times, it might be charming. But it works against the vibe the rest of the game is trying to build.
Overall, the atmosphere was very lacking. With very uninteresting vehicle designs and baren bases, it doesn't feel like immersive in any way.
The missions themselves are uninteresting. Nothing about them really had a strong appeal.

Conclusion: I really wanted to enjoy it, but after several occasions where I raged due to the bad driving AI or because of boring, long trecks, I just had to stop.
In fact, just to compare it, I went to play Bomber Crew again. The first time after I played it through once many years ago. And it felt just so much smoother to play. Loading times are faster, menu is snappier and requires less clicks, no click-and-hold functions, no constant hand-holding the pilot or shooters (less micro-management), better atmosphere, more believable actions, feeling like your level ups or gear improvements are actually contributing to anything, it was more appealing to look at, etc.
I will sadly not continue playing this game. Maybe check an update or two, but very unlikely. Won't recommend it to friends either. A shame. I really enjoyed Bomber Crew. And I'm all up for new changes or trying something new out. But many of the design decisions were really bad on this one.

Really enjoyed Bomber Crew, but this and Space Crew just didn’t hit the way bomber crew did.