After the success of Euro Truck Simulator or simply just ETS (as it is known amongst the fans of this game) developers “SCS Software” hit jackpot once again and made an instant simulation classic that is going to be remmembered for a long time.
For the sake of this review I am not going to compare Euro Truck Simulator 2 with ETS 1, because it wouldn’t do justice. Although they carry the same name with a different number, you’d be mistaken to call them sequel and prequel. These games have very little if no connection at all with one another. So without further hesitation, let’s begin the review, shall we?
Current state:
The game was released in October of 2012 as an open development. It started as and still is a trucking simulator which you feel right from the get-go. What I always found exciting about this game and probably what draws most players (at least European) towards ETS - real locations and emotional connection. You’ve been travelling to these cities, drove down these roads, for some people it just seems… Familiar.
After starting your career and picking out the avatar, options vary from very stock photos to extremely uniteresting though to SCS’s credit, some are hilarious. Frankly, or not so frankly you don’t spend much time noticing your avatar or company logo. Because 99.9% of the time you are on the road, amigo. After picking out your favorite truck and starting location, you’re dropped into the chosen truck and have to make a short delivery. Game instantly introduces you to the mechanics and the basics. If you’re playing with a keyboard, mind yourself that controls take some time getting used to and even accidental moves of the mouse can put your cargo in danger of getting damaged because the camera turns. This game requires a bit of dedication and some skill. Don’t think that this is an easy and boring game to play. No matter how dull and repetitive it might look to a non-sim guy, you would be mistaken if you thought that it doesn’t require skill or attention.
In game, you spend all of your time doing one of two things: delivering cargo or roaming around the map, increasing your exploration percentage. The latter one you are entitled and able to do more, once your company has enough drivers to sustain itself and you’re earning money while not delivering cargo. Now if you do deliveries, you”ll start feeling like a trucker instantly. Some simulation and realistic elements such as: a sleep meter, fuel and truck’s damage all need to be taken care of, for example by stoping near a hotel and going to sleep.
When it comes to truck driving, this game lives up to it’s name. Trucks feel like big, heavy, not very agile diesel beasts that they truly are. And once you start looking at fuel consumption, acceleration, handling and driving experience you start to see that they’re all very different, and that sense of ‘unique’ make gamers feel immersed and choose their prefered trucks. For example to me Volvos always felt powerful and accelerated nicely, but consumed a lot of fuel, MAN’s I always felt like they’re quite hard to control so you won’t hit anything with the truck while.
turning and that the cabin is too high, Merc’s along with Scania’s just felt dull and generic trucks with nothing to pick on, DAF’s felt just a bit better than their competitors and Iveco - small engines with less horsepower, but crazy low fuel consumptions. And Renaults… Well… Let’s just move on. See? These features are the key for me when separating trucks, but I know and believe that other players had a criteria of their own that allowed to have fun and enjoy their time at ETS.
The driving around part can become boring if you spend your time roaming around the same spot. For example England or Germany. Scenery is very different depending on the country you are at, so going from Italy to Northern Poland will feel like a real travel experience. The cargo’s are usually delivered from city to city, occasionally you’ll find yourself delivering trailers to a suburban digging site or a wood mill near the outskirts of Gdansk. Cargo’s are different, but the trailers and companies you are doing deliveries from tend to repeat over time so the satisfaction and chance of new emotions gets smaller. What I thought was lacking in the base version of the game was: more traffic, heavier cargo and more countries. SCS has managed to fix one of these, partially improve another and has done nothing about the last one.
Traffic is kind of scarce in the game. Of course it is hard to make a Direct X9 game with true to life graphics and buzzing cities, but sometimes you spend minutes of driving in a highway with only a few or just one, or when no cars pass by you or can be seen. Plus the traffic in the cities isn’t as bad (realistic) as it should be, but while visiting, you don’t feel like in a city either, you get the sense that is just buildings plopped one close to the other and some traffic lights that have no life, just a purpose to let trucks and cars pass. Quite depressing if you think about it.
Heavier cargo- this was fixed with the most recent DLC. But previously, the most you could carry was about 25tons, which is a bit more than the standard cargo carried by truck drivers. Developers ramped it up and now the heaviest load is 60 tons.
The part that got partially fixed is more countries. Without mods and with a few Dlc’s you can have access to 14 EU countries + Switzerland and Norway. With pro-mods for example this number can rise to almost 25.
And we’ve come to the topic and the thing that keeps gamers loyal and happy in ETS 2. Mods. What the developers couldn’t do, mod creators made up for it. To start off: truck customization is really limited in the vanilla version (you have to pay for skins of trucks), but mod creators made thousands of color combinations and textures to make the game feel unique.
Still not intrigued ? I’ll give you a list. This won’t be fictional, a personal example. I have promods, rusmap (map of Russia), a real life companies mod and a few truck mods installed, here are some stats:
- Base version -> (with mods)
- Truck brands: 7 -> 13
- Cities: 69 -> 212
- Paint jobs: ~50->~125
- Companies: some -> a lot more
Well mods are great, but combining them like crazy might cause the game to crash and you should be beware that after an official update, you might need to disable the mods, because they just might be not compatible yet.
Moving back to the game. Progressing isn’t hard, but you just don’t get the rewards from the game and that’s why you have to hunt them elsewhere. You could own 20 garages with 99 truck drivers working for you, earning 200,000+€/day, but you can’t build a massive HQ, can’t really get the benefits of your work and enjoy that your business is a success. Well you can, but only to some extent. Most of these limitations can be broken with mods, but far from all. A Multiplayer mode is also avaliable, but it’s notorious for lagging drivers with bad connections that pop around the map, idiot drivers and trolls, so only go online if you’re up for the task.
To sum up, I truly recommend this game to every sim or truck game enthusiast or just a person who wants to relax while playing a game. But be prepared to hunt down mods as the base version is going to get monotonous and repetitive soon enough.
All in all, this game deserves a 8.1/10 without mods and 9.4/10 with them.
Try it out if you:
- like trucks
- enjoy sim games
- wish to get a small challenge
- prefer to play alone