FIA European Truck Racing Championship is a game that despite having no knowledge of the sport did spark my interest. In all honesty, I didn’t even know that pro truck racing was a thing! Still, there is something undeniably cool about racing a big beast of a truck around a track that is made for sleek formula 1 cars!
How to Download FIA European Truck Racing Championship
The game can be purchased on Steam. To start, click on the button located below the review. And if you like trucks, check out also our review of ETS 2.
The Game Review
I will admit, going into this game I was kind of hoping for an arcade-style of game similar to Sega’s 18 Wheeler American Pro Trucker. Instead, you have a game that is probably 70 percent sim 30 percent arcade. There is certainly a learning curve to FIA European Truck Racing Championship, but it is actually handled quite well.
The main idea of the game is playing through the career mode which as I understand is pretty authentic in its drivers and tracks. However, before this, you have to do these license tests which teach you how to play the game. This is a good thing as driving one of these big-rig SOB’s is not the same as driving a regular car in another racing game.
There are a few things that you need to get to grips with when driving. The overall “feel” of the truck is rather slow and momentum plays a big part in how your drive. This is especially true for taking corners. It took me a while to get this down, especially as you cannot use your brakes all of the time as they have a water meter. The driving is actually rather interesting once you get the hang of it.
The goal of the career mode is that you start off as a nobody. Eventually, you want to win enough or do well enough to attract a major team to want to take you on. Now you can start to upgrade your truck and progress through the ranking. There is a nice amount of progression here. The whole thing though kind of feels bare bones. I am not saying it is bad or boring, but it is not exactly riveting stuff.
I feel that if you like racing games, you will probably get a kick out of how different this feels. The AI provides you with quite a fair challenge, they are thankfully not super drivers that can take corners at full speed. They race the same kind of way you do so it does feel rather fair, even if they seem uninterested in trying to take over when on a long straight.
Presentation-wise FIA European Truck Racing Championship is not exactly the best-looking game I have ever played. Some of the trucks look cool and while I know nothing about them, I have heard that they have tried to be as authentic as possible with the look of the trucks. The whole game has a kind of jaggedness to it which I hope is improved at some point down the road.
I must say that I was kind of surprised by FIA European Truck Racing Championship. I would not say that this is the greatest game of the year. However, I never found my self with a real desire to turn the thing off. There is a kind of appeal here that is really hard to explain. I think if they had just gone a little more “arcade” with the gameplay it could have been a real smash hit.
