Food Truck Simulator (Xbox) Review

From the minds of the guys and girls at Drago Entertainment comes Food Truck Simulator and with it, a chance to jump into the hectic world of mobile catering as you build your small time business from the ground up while enjoying the trials and tribulations of feeding the masses.

Food Truck Simulator Gameplay

After the death of your beloved father, it’s up to you to take on the family business and make him proud. Starting with the essentials – such as giving your truck a kickass design – you brand your business exactly how you want it, before setting forth to get feed the hungry mouths of the locals.

Surprisingly, driving to-and-from locations is a manual process. I was expecting a fast-travel feature and was delighted to discover there was a driving element to the game and a decent, bug-free one at that. Driving my truck around sent my thoughts back to the likes of Grand Theft Auto 3, albeit with a lot less violence and a lot more food.

The first destination on the list is to the local supplier to pick up your first inventory. Here you meet a lady called Clara who also rings your cell occasionally to offer her pearls of wisdom. Clara also explains to you that that the ingredients you have just purchased need to be added to their relevant storage spaces: shelves, fridge and freezer. While it’s fine to use the automatic feature on the first visit, I’d recommend you do any following sorting manually as its not as accurate as one would think.

Now you have a well-stocked truck, so it’s time to drive to your destination and begin cooking.

Cooking in Food Truck Simulator

Of course, you can’t run a successful food truck business if you’re not prepared to brave the heat of the kitchen and get cooking and it’s here where the chaos starts. The task here is to serve the customers as quickly as possible and with accuracy (so, if you work at McDonald’s, this game really isn’t for you). It’s here that I would have liked to have seen a little time before opening for essential prep work. Sadly, however, you’re thrown right into the action and have to prep as you go. While this adds nicely to the stress factor, it’s not realistic and takes away a real part of catering where you need to prep the right things for the day and enjoy a peaceful moment before the storm inevitably kicks in (spoken as a former chef).

Usefully, orders come up on your truck’s monitors that allow you to see the ingredients needed as you’re preparing the meals. This includes information pertaining to how your customers would like their food cooked (well done, rare, medium, et al), which I thought to be a nice touch.

The cooking process is similar to that of Cooking Simulator, where you need to cut ingredients using a knife-action mini-game and prepare ingredients through other mini-games, such as rolling out pizza dough and spreading pizza sauce. Again, I was pleasantly surprised by this element of gameplay and felt it added some variety to the game.

Food Truck Simulator – Summary

While Food Truck Simulator won’t stun you with graphics, the gameplay more than makes up for this and the story acts as a nice punctuation to the experience, with the occasional cutscene and event thrown into the broth (see what I did there?).

With ladles of fun (I’m so sorry) and a generous pinch of mayhem, Food Truck Simulator has a lot to offer, especially at its lowly price tag. It can be fiddly at times but I quickly found that turning the sensitivity down to .7 eradicates the issue.

Don your chef whites, fire up those ovens and face the heat of this job simulation game, the hungry are waiting!