Review: 18 Wheels of Steel: Extreme Trucker

More trucking games, right? Well, Extreme Trucker is different from the classic 18 WOS games in a lot of ways. How many? Let's see.

Extreme Trucker takes you to 3 different locations from around the world: The Australian Outback, the Canadian ice roads, and the "Death Road", or Yungas Road. The ice roads are the easiest with a lot of room, little traffic, and short distances. Australia brings you higher speeds, longer drives, and big loads. Yungas Road is the hardest with high speeds, narrow roads, and a lot of traffic.

The concept of Extreme Trucker takes you away from the "your the boss" sandbox play of classic 18 Wheels of Steel games, and puts you into an arcade-style simulator. You're randomly given a choice of different loads to pull and trucks to drive, and where they're going. When you complete those, you get experience points. The higher the experience, the better the loads and trucks you're able to use. Of course damage and time affect the amount of experience gained from each contract, but there is no money or police to get in your way anymore.

While playing this game, I found the trucks drive a lot better than previous truck simulators. Steering is fine, and speeds are good too. The only game play issues I really found are that after a while this game can get boring, just like all truck simulators, but while it lasts, it's a great game.

My Rating: 8/10

Review: 18 Wheels of Steel: American Long Haul

Some of you might call it a boring truck driving game, but to somewhat losers like me, it's hours of fun. 18 Wheels of Steel: American Long Haul puts you on the open road hauling to dozens of major cities in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. You manage your trucks, hire drivers, and drive the trucks yourself pulling anything from milk to lumber.

The game starts giving you a terrible truck and some money, more money depending on how easy the difficulty you're on. With that crappy truck, you complete jobs making money along the way. You can hire drivers, buy more trucks, and upgrade your trucks, all so that you can hit it big.

Lets start off with the bad parts of the game, because there are quite a few. First off, the trucks don't drive realistically....at all really. Steering is hard, speeds are slow, and braking is terrible. The worse part is, while you're doing full speed 35 mph on the highway pulling horses, other trucks are darting past you going 95 pulling the same load. A similar issue is that whenever you turn your truck the slightest bit, it slows down....a lot. This makes driving on windy roads a huge pain.

More issues! In real life, you can get away with doing 90 down the interstate as long as the cop doing spot you. Not in this game! In American Long Haul, you have a meter that goes up whenever you violate the law. This meter will slowly go down over time, but if you pass a cop when your meter's high, you get pulled over. You could get a ticket in Mexico for speeding in California. Another annoyance with civilians and cops is that the civilians drive like idiots. If they cut into you, you'll get the ticket. They also like to come to complete stops in front of you.

Finally, the good parts. American Long Haul gives you a wide selection of trucks and trailers, and most of which can be customized. The game also has few glitches since it's so simple. Even if you don't like delivering loads with trucks, this is still a fun game to hit civilians and wreck your truck.

My Rating: 6/10