Heavy Cargo - The Truck Simulator

My honest first reaction to Heavy Cargo was that someone finally asked the right question: what if the interesting part of heavy haulage wasn't the driving, but everything that has to happen before the truck moves an inch? The route-scouting loop, where you take a MAN TGE spotting van out ahead of your convoy to identify tight bends, low bridges, and guardrails that need dismantling, is a genuinely fresh mechanic for this genre. It adds a pre-mission planning layer that Euro Truck Simulator 2 never bothered with, and it mirrors how real-world specialist logistics companies actually operate. The Gruber Logistics partnership gives the game a credibility anchor. Cargo types include turbine components, industrial transformers, and rotor blades, not the anonymous freight boxes of a generic hauler. Trailers are modelled on real equipment, some with up to 24 individually simulated axles, and the trucks themselves, licensed MAN and Scania models, include systems like retarders and compressed air that sim fans will appreciate. Two game modes let you choose your depth of investment: Economy Mode puts you in the company owner seat, hiring staff, purchasing new trucks and trailers, and chasing milestone rewards; Employee Mode strips the finance layer away entirely and focuses on star ratings and precision driving. For newcomers to truck sims, Employee Mode is the sensible entry point, and the tutorial does a reasonable job of walking through crane operations and route preparation before throwing you into the roughly 30 missions on offer. Here is the problem, and it is not a small one. The driving itself, the thing that accounts for the bulk of your time, is where the package comes apart. Steering on controller feels disconnected and either understeers or over-corrects, a complaint that showed up consistently across player feedback at launch. The AI traffic behaviour is similarly rough: vehicles cutting across the front of your rig, inconsistent behaviour at traffic lights generating unfair penalties, and escort vehicle pathfinding that is more nuisance than help. For a sim that stakes its reputation on realism, having your authentically modelled MAN truck handle like a shopping trolley on ice is a fundamental contradiction. The mid-delivery interruptions, stopping a haul to dismantle a crash barrier by hand, also divide players; the concept is sound in theory, but the execution disrupts momentum in ways that feel more like busywork than challenge. On PC, the comparison to SCS Software's output is brutal and unavoidable. ETS2 and ATS have years of polish, vast mod libraries, and communities that have pushed those sims to extraordinary depth. Heavy Cargo cannot compete on those terms right now. On console, where that competition is thinner and the route-scouting and crane mechanics genuinely stand out as something different, the value proposition is more defensible. A Heavy South DLC targeting Q2 2026 signals that the developers are committed to expanding the content slate, which at least suggests post-launch support is not abandoned. But what this game needs before content is a thorough pass on vehicle handling and AI behaviour. The bones are interesting enough to warrant watching, but not interesting enough to paper over the roughness of the current build.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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