Offroad Truck Simulator: Heavy Duty Challenge®

My first reaction sitting down with Heavy Duty Challenge was genuine excitement: a simulator built around the real-world Europa Truck Trial circuit is a concept that almost nobody else is doing. Forget hauling freight on tarmac motorways or drifting a pickup truck through a rally stage. This is methodical, low-speed brutalism, wedging massive licensed machines like the Mercedes Unimog U1 550L, the MAN TGS 35.480, and the Hummer H1 over rocks and through gate-flagged courses where stopping or reversing literally costs you points. The core Sports Mode, when it works, genuinely clicks. You are managing gear selection, locking and unlocking differentials across two, four, six, or eight driven wheels, reading your line three truck-lengths ahead, and suffering beautifully when you get it wrong and beach yourself on a boulder. That tactile, mechanical feel of coaxing a multi-tonne rig over an obstacle at walking pace is something Snowrunner fans will recognise and respect. The problem is the word "when." This game launched rough, got patched, and then stayed rough in different ways. Steam user scores hover right around the 50 percent mark, and the recurring complaint across reviews and community posts is performance: frame rates that dip to uncomfortable levels even on hardware that clears the recommended specs, bugs that reset your settings on relaunch, and suspension damage in Cargo Mode that can accumulate with no repair option, dragging your truck's nose along the ground for the rest of the session. Force feedback on steering wheels needs attention too, with early players noting the wheel resistance was genuinely fatiguing until the developers turned it down via patch. Controller players on Xbox have flagged camera spin issues that remain unreliable. None of this is fatal on its own, but together it chips away at concentration right when the game demands your full focus. The three-mode structure is the right shape. Sports Mode handles the timed, gated championship runs. Cargo Mode tasks you with hauling loads across Utah and European forest routes, earning credits to unlock more trucks from a roster of over twelve vehicles. Off-Road Trips Mode is the free-roam option for when you just want to poke around the scenery at your own pace, and the Utah and European landscapes do have some genuine visual charm even if level-of-detail pop-in can be jarring. The problem is that Sports Mode is comfortably the strongest of the three, and the other modes feel less refined, with bugs hitting harder in the open-ended content where the engine is under more varied stress. Comparisons to MudRunner and SnowRunner are everywhere in the community, but they are a bit misleading. Those games are open-world logistics puzzles. This one is closer to a gymkhana or trials discipline, shorter and more focused per session, which is a legitimate niche. For the sports-and-racing crowd I usually speak to: there is no local co-op, no split-screen, no quick pick-up-and-play hook for a casual session. Leaderboards exist for Sports Mode, which gives solo players something to chase, but if you were hoping to rope in a friend for a Saturday night laugh with a truck, this is not that game. Wheel and pedal support is present and theoretically rewarding, though the force feedback calibration issues mean setup time is real. Gamepad play is functional but the steering sensitivity is noted as being high and twitchy, especially at low speeds where precision matters most. The concept here is niche enough that if truck trials genuinely interest you, there is probably nothing else on the market doing it this specifically. But the persistent performance issues and the uneven quality across modes mean patience is a prerequisite, not a bonus.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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