18 Wheels of Steel: Convoy

I went into 18 Wheels of Steel: Convoy expecting a budget curio and came out with mixed feelings that only a sim specialist can fully articulate. This is the fourth entry in SCS Software's original 18 Wheels of Steel run, and it shows every one of its years. The core loop is simple on paper: start solo, bid on cargo jobs across 40-plus cities spanning the US and Canada, manage fuel costs, absorb police fines, and gradually expand your single rig into a multi-truck convoy operation. There is a thin business management skin here - reputation gates access to larger, higher-paying contracts, and you have to actively hunt for work at cargo docks, gas stations, and highway motels rather than having jobs handed to you. For players who live in spreadsheets, that job-bidding rhythm has a low but real pull. The fleet-building angle is where Convoy tries to differentiate itself from its predecessors. You scale from one hauler to a network of rigs, captaining larger convoy runs that require coordinating multiple trucks on a single contract. The truck roster covers 32 models across nine manufacturers, and you can tune engine specs and paint to personalise your lead rig. None of this approaches the depth of a modern fleet sim, but the progression from solo driver to convoy boss is legible and reasonably satisfying if you meet it at its own level. The map covers 40-plus cities, and crossing from Vancouver to the eastern seaboard takes real in-game time - the sense of distance is genuine even if the world detail is thin by 2025 standards. Now the problems, and there are several worth flagging before you commit. There is no mid-delivery save. That is a hard stop for a game where a coast-to-coast run can chew through a long session. Crashes, reportedly tied to the aging Prism3D engine on certain hardware configurations, compound the frustration. In-game music drops out entirely during driving - menu-only audio - which reviewers have been complaining about since 2005 and nothing has changed. Mod support is essentially zero, which hurts an old game like this badly. Euro Truck Simulator 2, built by the same studio years later, made every one of these design calls differently and better. Convoy has no answer to that comparison except price and nostalgia. Who actually belongs here? Trucking sim completionists who want to trace SCS's evolution from budget publisher work to the studio behind American Truck Simulator. Retro sim fans who remember the 18 WOS era fondly and can tolerate 2005-era roughness with clear eyes. Newcomers to the genre should skip this entirely and go straight to a modern title - the tutorial is functional but the overall package will frustrate rather than teach. The Steam user base sits at roughly 76 percent positive across a small review pool, which translates to "fans of the era like it, everyone else is confused."

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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