Hard Truck Apocalypse: Rise Of Clans / Ex Machina: Meridian 113

I'll be straight with you: this is a janky, creaky, deeply charming slice of early-2000s Russian game design that somehow still has a pulse. Rise of Clans, known in its home territory as Ex Machina: Meridian 113, is a vehicular action-RPG set across a post-apocalyptic North America, where you play as a new protagonist called Vagrant and spend your time hauling cargo, blasting rival clans off the road, customising your rig, and chasing down a plot that reportedly has more twists than most games three times its budget. It sits at a Mostly Positive rating on Steam across several hundred reviews, which for a niche mid-2000s Eastern European title is genuinely impressive. The core loop is more interesting than the genre label suggests. This is not a racing game in any traditional sense. You are managing a truck with swappable cabs, trailers, and weapon loadouts, earning money from combat and cargo runs, and grinding through side quests that boil down to go here, kill these people, bring that thing back. A critical hit system adds some tactical texture to combat encounters, and you can now consume trade goods mid-run to repair your vehicle, which gives resource management a bit of real teeth. Pacing runs faster than the original Hard Truck Apocalypse, and the maps feel denser and more varied. The multiplayer mode technically exists, with deathmatch and team deathmatch supporting up to 16 players across four maps, but community activity is effectively zero in 2026, so treat that as a footnote rather than a selling point. The rough edges are significant and you should know about them before you click anything. The English translation is bad. Not charmingly rough, actually bad, the kind of bad where mission prompts become guesswork and UI labels read like someone ran the original Russian through a blender. Voice acting is a mixed bag: some characters deliver decent performances, others sound like they were recorded in a car park. The underlying engine is from the mid-2000s, which means getting stable video settings on modern Windows requires manual config file editing, and the in-game anisotropic filtering will crash the game outright. This is a game for people who are comfortable with a little friction. As a solo experience for someone who played the original Hard Truck Apocalypse, or who just has a soft spot for dieselpunk open-world oddities from the era before AAA studios homogenised everything, Rise of Clans has genuine appeal. It is shorter than its predecessor, but tighter in places, and the new weapons, loot mechanics, and additional vehicle options give returning players enough fresh material to justify the run. If you have never touched the series before, the original game is a better entry point, though this one can technically be played standalone. Casual players expecting something polished or co-op-friendly should look elsewhere, there is no split-screen, the multiplayer is dormant, and the learning curve is mostly spent fighting the interface rather than enemy trucks.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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