Hard Truck Apocalypse: Arcade / Ex Machina: Arcade

I went in hoping for a scrappy post-apocalyptic truck shooter with some arcade-flavored chaos, maybe a Twisted Metal-ish vibe in the dusty canyons of a virus-wrecked America. What I got was a game that community reviewers have rated Mostly Negative for good reason, and after poking around its handful of missions, I can see exactly why. This is a third-person truck combat game where you drive a single armored vehicle through deserted prairies and canyons, shooting gang enemies and scavenging whatever you can before spending your haul on truck upgrades between missions. The setup has bones. The execution does not. Controls are non-rebindable, which in 2025 is just inexcusable, and the keyboard-and-mouse handling feels spongy and imprecise when you are trying to aim mounted weapons from a moving truck. Controller support is absent, so if you were eyeing this for a casual couch session with a gamepad, close this tab now. There is no split-screen, no co-op, no multiplayer of any kind. It is a strictly solo experience, and not a comfortable one. The mission structure is where the frustration really stacks up. Missions drag on across long stretches of similar terrain with sparse checkpoints and almost no healing items. When a tornado spawns and grabs your truck from a distance and simply refuses to let go, you will either laugh or close the game. Most players close the game. Upgrade costs feel wildly out of step with what you earn, so progression grinds against you rather than rewarding clever play. The physics on the truck itself feel loose in the wrong way, more like a sliding bar of soap than an armored vehicle built for war. The store page compounds things by showing screenshots pulled from the original Hard Truck: Apocalypse rather than this game, so the visuals you see before buying are genuinely not what you get. That is a transparency problem worth knowing before you hand over money. The actual graphics are rough even by the standards of the release year, and running the game at modern resolutions requires manual config file edits. If you are a fan of the original Ex Machina and curious what a simplified spin-off looks like, the honest answer is: thinner in every direction. The RPG trading, faction interactions, and open-world structure of the original are all gone. What remains is a stripped-back drive-and-shoot loop that loses the things that gave its predecessor personality. There is a sliver of the player base that finds nostalgic comfort in its arcade simplicity, and for them it might land. For everyone else, the original Hard Truck: Apocalypse is the better game in the same catalogue.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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