Heavy Duty Challenge: The Off-Road Truck Simulator didn’t give a good first impression, to put it lightly. The early press build that we’ve been privy to has had countless problems, from UI and UI controls to simple settings doing nothing. After 40 minutes of trying to change settings and sort out many issues, the stock music that repeats on the main menu might have driven me mad. Or, the madness came from in-game controls. All of this is to preface why I might be angry at several portions of HDC from the off.

Somewhere between the WRC and European Truck Championship, Heavy Duty Challenge puts you into the cab of the Europa Truck-Trial. For those of you American enough, that means something mad a German named Peter thought would be fun for men who wear jeans and a dress shirt that also likes getting dirt under their fingernails. Looking a bit more like the support trucks for the Dakar rally than the 18-wheelers on the road, these brutish monsters are sent out on small courses of rocky hills and generally rough terrain to beat times and score points by getting through gates.

It seems like a great idea for games, especially the simulator genre which loves to put you in stupid situations that you have to get out of. Fully manual and whatever you’d call it when you can change multiple differentials (LSD maybe?), HDC wants to fill that market space for better or worse. The idea itself isn’t bad. In fact, after a while, I was enjoying it in that weird way men do when anything challenges their ability to do something. Tell a guy he can’t get the car out of the mud at a festival, he’ll see red and have it moved or tactically nuked, whichever is easier.

Where Nano Games and Aerosoft GmbH misstep though is that technically it has been a disaster to play and enjoy. Mostly because of the aforementioned bugs that have been patched (sort of), new issues cropping up nearly every time, and more specifically the performance is atrocious. The smallest bits of enjoyment are often overshadowed by massive grievances looming overhead. I’ll admit that out of the gate the bugs with my option of wheel and peddles can be a result of age. However, half of the crashes, complete dips in performance, a number of visual glitches, and more aren’t peripheral-specific.

The core of HDC when it is giving you a direct course to follow is enjoyable enough as you drop gears, change the differentials to climb over rocks, and gain traction as you maneuver around obstacles. That portion works brilliantly, with a mix of PS2 vibes (which I’ll explain in a second) and a modern simulator, you’re battling the terrain as you make it through these gates and against the clock to score points. It is just a shame that despite running on hardware that exceeds the minimum and recommended specs on Steam, Heavy Duty Challenge runs about as well as an asthmatic 20-year-old dog.

Running Heavy Duty Challenge on the “low” preset, everything has that shade of a PS2 game but crisp and clear, and I would like to say it runs 60fps but it doesn’t. I played at 1080P because running across two monitors at 3840×1080 wasn’t possible when attempted it. Over my time with the game, I saw a majority of the gameplay dropping to 40fps for a constant frame rate with dips below 30. On the highest settings possible I’d be lucky to stay above 30 at 1080P: This same PC runs Cyberpunk 2077 and Ratchet and Clank on Ultra at 60, yet at low it struggles with HDC.

HDC is a niche within a niche for what passes as simulators. When Heavy Duty Challenge shines it is blindingly great at doing what it aims to achieve, but when I can describe the very same game as almost as buggy as a Bethesda title and near unplayable as CD Projekt Red’s biggest disaster, fog descends on the glimmers of hope. Within a 40-minute period, I’ve had HDC crash a handful of times. I’ve had settings simply not work, I’ve relaunched HDC and spitefully found them reset to default for having the gall to play, and depending on the updates (which have been frequent) in the last week, certain options have appeared and disappeared.

I want to say that I like Heavy Duty Challenge because it is simple in its desires but sadly aims a little too high to achieve them. Out of curiosity more than anything, I dropped the resolution to 720P but put all graphics options to as high as they’ll go, with results achieving an almost stable 30 frames per second. The simple goal of getting through X number of gates matched with so-so performance when you drop practically every setting brings a thought of PS2 fun arcade simulators, which is fun enough. However, chances are that you are going to spend a large amount of time arguing with HDC as you play.

Aiming at Saber Interactive’s MudRunner and SnowRunner, Heavy Duty Challenge: The Off-Road Truck Simulator is left behind in the marsh with performance woes. Sadly, it is also tied too closely to a motorsport to not be considered more than a niche. Ultimately HDC might (emphasis on the might) excite a handful of people and be enjoyable to a few.

Though on a wider scale about as enjoyable as driving into a muddy forest and trying to climb a hill in a Reliant Robin. I’d have liked to have said more nice things about HDC, but it drove me to insanity with bugs and music, was sometimes sickening with how it lurched in performance, and offered simple gameplay I could get elsewhere.

A PC review copy of Heavy Duty Challenge: The Off-Road Truck Simulator was provided by Aerosoft GmbH for this review.

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Heavy Duty Challenge: The Off-Road Truck Simulator

$29.99

5

Score

5.0/10

Pros

• Decent gameplay between frame drops.

Cons

• Poor performance.
• Buggy and crashes on a whim.
• Gameplay focusing around slowly replaying small courses in different variations of truck.