FIA ETRC - Indianapolis Motor Speedway

My Saturday night co-op crew took one look at a 5-tonne truck lumbering into a hairpin at Laguna Seca and immediately wanted a go. That instinct is right, but the full picture is more complicated than the fun first impression suggests. FIA European Truck Racing Championship lands somewhere between a light sim and an arcade racer, and that in-between position is both its charm and its biggest problem. The driving model is the standout reason to bother. Braking is a genuine mechanical puzzle: the trucks run a limited water tank to spray-cool their brake pads, and you have to ration that supply across the race while managing temperatures that spike into the danger zone every time you haul down from the 160 km/h speed cap. Tyre wear degrades grip lap by lap, and the narrow power band means you need to stay in a specific gear range to get meaningful acceleration out of corners. There are four gears total, and two of them barely see use. None of that sounds glamorous, but in practice it creates a style of strategic driving you won't find in any other racing game on PC right now. The game also runs a strict penalty system: corner-cut markers and contact warnings are enforced firmly, so you can't just bulldoze your way through the pack. Content-wise you get 14 circuits including Silverstone, Laguna Seca, Fuji Speedway, and Circuit of The Americas, plus 45 officially livered trucks across 20 teams covering both the real ETRC season and a second fictional World Series championship. The World Series trucks handle notably differently, snapping between understeer and oversteer in a way that takes patience to tame. Career mode starts you hopping between short team contracts, building reputation before longer deals open up, and on paper that structure sounds solid. In practice the AI is soft enough that winning the European championship in your first season is very doable even at high difficulty, and the upgrade and team-building features that are supposed to open after season one have been reported as bugged on some platforms. A 15-lesson driving school eases you in well, but once that novelty fades the single-player loop runs thin fast. Wheel and pedal setup feels noticeably better than pad, where throttle and steering response is less linear than you'd want. For the group-play question: split-screen is present, which is genuinely appreciated, and watching four people try to brake a truck into a chicane without cooking the pads is a great twenty minutes. Online is effectively a ghost town. Even close to launch reviewers were reporting empty lobbies, and years later that situation has not improved. The 67% Mixed Steam rating reflects exactly this: the core driving concept is clever and novel, the surrounding game is undercooked. Graphics are adequate at best, with flat trackside textures on a 2019 title, and rainy conditions represent the visual high point. If you follow actual truck racing or you want something mechanically left-field to drop into a local multiplayer night, there is genuine fun buried here. If you want a polished career mode, competitive online, or gamepad-friendly handling out of the box, look elsewhere.

Alex · Scout Team

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