Truckful made me fall in love with a rusty pickup, then tested that love with equipment swapping and lost progress
I fell in love with Truckful when I saw the first videos the developers shared on X. A rusty pickup, a gorgeous countryside map, and a truck bed full of things threatening to fall out at every corner. Months later, playing on my ROG Xbox Ally X, those opening hours delivered exactly what I wanted. The disappointment came later, once some baffling decisions started getting in the way.
Driving feels wonderful at first. The pickup has real weight, and carrying cargo gives every turn a little tension. You accept a job, arrange oddly shaped objects in your initially tiny truck bed like a physical game of Tetris, then try to reach your destination without scattering or smashing everything. Packing carefully and resisting the urge to drift around corners makes an ordinary delivery surprisingly satisfying.
There is also more happening here than hauling someone's belongings across town. Rutti is one of the first characters you meet, and getting to know the tiny village's other residents gradually reveals something strange beneath the pretty scenery. Something happened here years ago, and that unresolved history gives the errands a welcome sense of purpose beyond earning the next upgrade.
That contrast between pleasant work and creeping dread recalls Dredge. Truckful has its own nasty surprises, including a large, angry truck chasing you through the dark forest and a locomotive in the tunnels that seemed determined to get me every time. I ate this stuff up. The world was inviting enough to explore, then unsettling enough to make me curious about what was waiting around the next bend.
Unfortunately, that was the honeymoon period. The world uses a Metroidvania-lite structure, with routes blocked until you acquire the right equipment. I love that idea for a driving adventure. A ram breaks barriers, nitro handles big jumps, and tools such as a winch or snorkel help with watery obstacles. There is even a train horn for shifting large pigs out of your way. The problem is that you can only equip three power-ups at once.
In practice, I felt like I had one usable slot. The navigator occupies the first because it lets you see your position on the map. Without it, you can follow road signs, but the map has no road labels to help you match those signs to your route. Translating the isometric view into directions on a flat map is awkward enough with a position marker. Basic navigation should not feel like equipment I have to sacrifice something else to keep.
Opening that map is another irritation. There is no quick map button, so I had to pause and move across two tabs whenever I wanted to check my route. Doing that repeatedly breaks up the driving far more than it should. Worse, the map does not clearly mark blocked paths with the tools they require, leaving me without the information needed to plan around the equipment limit.
My second slot effectively belonged to the sticky truck ability, which magnetizes the load to stop it flying away. Covered beds can help, but the useful alternatives are often expensive, while smaller options are impractical for deliveries involving lots of objects. Technically, I could remove either ability. Realistically, both solved problems that were too persistent to ignore, leaving one slot for everything the road demanded.
And the road regularly demands more than one thing. You might need the horn followed by the snorkel, or the snorkel and then the winch. My routine became driving until I found an obstacle, heading to a garage to swap equipment, returning, and discovering another obstacle that required something else. Unlocking an ability should make exploration more rewarding. Here, owning the solution often just meant another trip to equip it.
I would understand the restriction better if route planning gave me enough information to make interesting choices. Instead, it became tedious trial and error. Letting me keep traversal tools available, or keeping cleared routes open where appropriate, would preserve far more momentum. Delivery conditions and cargo damage already provide plenty of room for challenge without turning the journey into repeated garage visits.
The physics are the other major frustration. I love how heavy the truck feels, but a small bump or slight turn can sometimes send objects flying and turn a delivery into a reload. There is enjoyable tension in protecting a precarious load, and then there are moments when the result feels wildly out of proportion to the mistake. Truckful crosses that line too often.
Getting stuck is worse. Later upgrades require scavenging scrap, which means driving into the nooks and crannies where it is tucked away and loading it onto the bed. Too often, I ended up wedged against the scenery or trapped in an Austin Powers-style turning situation. I could not get myself free, and reloading the last checkpoint was the only way out I found. Those checkpoints were far enough apart to make every reset hurt.
Across roughly ten hours, it felt like I lost four to getting stuck, reloading, and repeating progress. That eventually made me stop playing. I have not finished Truckful, and I am waiting for the developers to improve things before returning. I still want to see its mystery through, but I would love to see mission replay added alongside quality-of-life updates: a reliable way to get the truck unstuck, more frequent checkpoints, a quick map button, road labels, and clearer obstacle markers. Making traversal equipment less of a chore to manage would help too. Those changes would make coming back and finishing the game much more worthwhile.
Visually, it remains stunning, and it runs fairly well on the ROG Xbox Ally X. But the attractive isometric camera needs work, particularly when foreground scenery obscures the road. Hiding those elements while driving would make the view more useful without spoiling the art.
Truckful has lovely handling, a compelling mystery, and an opening I genuinely loved. There is a good game here, but equipment restrictions and repeated lost progress made staying in love with it much harder than it should have been. Thanks for reading!
