Switch to: German
Windmills, tulip fields and idyllic dike landscapes: The latest installment of the Truck Driver series is unmistakenly set in the Netherlands.
Truck Driver: The Dutch Connection by SOEDESCO was released on October 31st for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S for around €40 /£35 / $40 (for a limited time, there’s a 10% discount for PS Plus members and on the Xbox Store). Its predecessor Truck Driver was released in 2019 for PS4 and Xbox One and in the following two years for Nintendo Switch and PC. While The Dutch Connection is currently only available for consoles, a PC version is planned to be released in the future.
Trucking in Oran-yay, Story nay
The year is 2027. Truckers are having to contend with AI dispatchers. Felix, a trucker in his fifties with a whopping 30 years of experience, has moved from the US to a fictionalized version of the Netherlands and is dealing with the resulting problems with his wife Sara, who stayed behind. At work, he meets Lucas, the second playable protagonist in his mid-twenties and at odds with his parents because he chose a life on the open road over a stable office job. The game tries to create an authentic father-son dynamic, but the story, with its clichéd and shallow dialogue, is at times hard to bear. For example, when Lucas, in his side hustle as an influencer, cracks yet another pun, shows a complete lack of tact when discussing sensitive topics, or engages in cringeworthy flirtations with love interest student Lily. In watercolor-style still images we learn what happens off the road – it’s not much.
While being on the road, we listen to these inconsequential dialogues, relatively professionally voiced in English. The quality of the German text localization is a mixed bag. These talks become increasingly rare over the course of the 15 missions and slightly over a dozen hours of gameplay. Instead, the routes become progressively longer, and the AI sends us sometimes twice across the entire map. Quite self-referentially, Lucas delivers video games for the game’s publisher, SOEDESCO, which makes perfect sense, given his passionate affinity for the Truck Driver franchise. At least the campaign concludes with a lengthy wall of text that rightly addresses the adverse working conditions and the importance of the truckers’ work.
The virtual representation of the Netherlands is varied in design, ranging from sprawling tulip fields and windmills to coastal lighthouses and sailboats at sea, massive wind farms, steep mountain ranges and a few small towns laid out in a grid pattern, which are eerily empty – apart from a few people, who for some reason are usually running away from something, and loudly squawking seagulls, there’s little to be found. The environmental details aren’t always particularly elaborate, and some areas are wastelands, which seemingly have been crammed with as many props as possible.
Caution: Oversaturated Cargo
The game supports a variety of steering wheels, and we played it on PlayStation 5 Pro with a DualSense controller, which supports both haptic feedback and adaptive triggers in this game. The handling of the three available trucks is neither satisyfing in terms of realism or arcade style. At high speeds, the back of the vehicles tends to suddenly break away, forcing us to pay for expensive repairs at the closest garage. Adjusting the steering wheel sensitivity is our only option for keeping the trucks somewhat on the road, and even that has little effect. At the garages, we’re able to adjust stability, durability and speed of our trucks, fill our cabs with all sorts of odds and ends, and we can purchase a small selection of pre-made paint jobs. A basic skill tree allows us to add a few bonuses, but by the end of the game, we’ll have accumulated enough experience points to unlock everything anyway.
While the trucks are presented in relatively high detail, the same cannot necessarily be said for the AI traffic, which is depicted by using simple models. Ray tracing provides attractive lighting and shadow effects and real-time reflections also look nice. The weather effects and the simulation of day and night are particularly impressive, even if the transitions are too abrupt. We have rarely experienced such intense storms in a video game as in Truck Driver: The Dutch Connection. While the wind beats, and the rain lashes against the windshield, trees sway in the storm. Due to the high contrast and saturation, the game can look quite apocalyptic, and the glaring instruments are barely legible when it’s dark outside. Once the storm has passed, watching the rising sun shining through the treetops and reflecting in the puddles makes us almost forget the previous cringeworthy moment in the campaign.
Survival of the Patient
At gas stations, we regularly have to refuel, we grab some food at restaurants and bakeries and rest at hotels – quite the contrast to truckers fighting for the last remaining spots at completely overcrowded rest areas in real-life. There are also far too few of these facilities, and so we regularly starve to death just before reaching a restaurant. While this can be seen as social commentary on the harsh working conditions, the integration of these survival elements in the game simply doesn’t feel well thought out. The subsequent automatic teleportation to the next gas station does at least sometimes save us some time getting to our destination.
We get fined for causing an accident, running a red light (which happens easily due to the lack of many road markings) or getting caught speeding by a speed camera or patrol car. That’s not a big issue since the game automatically generates money for us in the campaign.
In Freedom-to-Roam, we can pick and choose missions of varying lengths and unlock new customization options and trucks in addition to moving along the skill tree from the campaign. In this mode, we have to manage our finances wisely, but it’s not as complex as Euro Truck Simulator 2 with its numerous missions, cargo types, trucks and AI personnel at our disposal.
Radio Free Europe
On the radio, we can listen to generic heavy metal, techno and pop instrumental music. That is unless streamer mode is irrevocably activated, leaving us with a few repetitive, minimalist instrumental tracks. The engine sounds lack punch and they sound more like of a freight train than of a truck. Since there are hardly any options, we can’t even turn down the music. Also, keys can’t be assigned, and in our testing cruise control didn’t work even once.
The game is riddled with bugs and glitches. Prompts frequently stay stuck on-screen, and the AI traffic seems to follow fixed routes, regardless of whether you’re in their way. They also like to turn right while driving on the left lane, frequently run red lights by using an imaginary traffic light for turning, and stop in the middle of the road, creating accidents and interminable traffic jams. At one point, an entire section of the road vanished, and all of the cars made their way along the mountainside. The dreary, minimalist road layout offers hardly any room to maneuver in these situations, and when it does, it takes forever. While we’re making our way through the third consecutive exit loop, we momentarily nod off – both virtually and in reality.
PS5 Pro Enhancements
On PS5 Pro, compared to base PS5’s software-based solution, there’s hardware-based ray tracing with up to 60 FPS (frames-per-second), 120 Hz modes with frame rates above 60 FPS and higher visual settings. There are a lot of graphics options, including four rendering modes (a fidelity pro mode with 30 FPS or unlocked frame rate and a performance pro mode with and without ray tracing) with up to three different frame rate limits (40/60/120 FPS), two different modes for shadows and mirrors, V-Sync and we can even set the sharpness of the upscaler. In addition to that we can use a surprisingly vast amount of different artistic looks and filters, which also work outside of the game’s photo mode.
Download of the left-hand screenshot | Download of the right-hand screenshot
Download of the left-hand screenshot | Download of the right-hand screenshot
While the visual differences between the regular graphics and ray tracing of ambient lighting, reflections and shadows is significant, fidelity pro mode offers sharper shadows and slightly more vegetation. The game utilizes variable refresh rate (VRR), which can lead to significant problems. With VRR active, we achieve around 50 to 70 FPS in fidelity pro mode, and in performance RT pro mode, with little traffic, we can even reach 100 FPS. However, with a lot of objects on screen, the frame rate regularly drops below PS5 Pro’s VRR range starting at 48 Hz. Normally, Low Framerate Compensation (LFC) should then kick in and stabilize the frame rate, instead the refresh rate fluctuates wildly between 48 and 120 Hz, resulting in severe screen flickering and transparent bars at the edges of the screen. Disabling variable refresh rate in the system settings leads to seemingly worse frame pacing, but at least it stops the entire screen from flickering heavily.
Final thoughts
A driving simulation with a story focus sounds like an interesting concept, but unfortunately, many games like Lake and now Truck Driver: The Dutch Connection fail to tell a compelling story and to create a game world that feels alive. The game keeps breaking its immersion, as in when we collapse from exhaustion in a hotel parking lot while being forced to wait until the clichéd dialogue has concluded.
This wouldn’t be so bad if the driving physics felt realistic, but the truck tends to become uncontrollably bouncy above 85 km/h, turning the sometimes lengthy journeys into a real test of patience. The monotonous road network with its unrealistic exits and chaotic AI traffic doesn’t exactly encourage players to spend more time in the virtual Netherlands in Freedom-to-Roam mode.
For the next installment in the series, we hope for a better script, a more varied road network and a more vibrant game world. If the next game manges to accomplish that, then Truck Driver could become a solid narrative driving experience. We can’t wholeheartedly recommend Truck Driver: The Dutch Connection even to the most die-hard trucking fans.
SOEDESCO provided us with Truck Driver: The Dutch Connection for PlayStation 5. We captured the screenshots on PS5 Pro.
