Motor Town: Behind The Wheel

The first hour is a genuine patience test, and I say that as someone who usually bounces straight off any game that refuses to explain itself. You get dropped into an open map with a cheap car, a job board you do not understand yet, menus that assume you already know the systems, and visuals that look like they were built to run on a laptop somebody's cousin donated. Nothing tells you where to go or why you should care. My honest first reaction was that I had wandered into an unfinished passion project by mistake. Stick with it to hour three, though, and something clicks into place, because the ordinary work is the entire point. The pitch, once you stop waiting for a tutorial that never arrives, is that you drive for a living. You take taxi fares and learn which neighbourhoods actually pay. You pick up a bus route and run it properly, doors, stops, timetable and all. You move freight, you fuel up, you watch the maintenance costs eat into what you earned, and you slowly buy your way into better vehicles that you genuinely own rather than rent from a menu. Career progression here is the drip-feed kind: every job funds the next slightly nicer machine, and the loop hooks precisely because the numbers are small and the roads are long. This is a podcast game in the truest sense. Queue up four hours of something and let the delivery run become the background rhythm of your evening. On the hardware side, this is a sim-handling game and it drives like one. Weight transfer matters, big vehicles feel big, and the trucks and buses ask you to plan a corner instead of yanking at it. A wheel and pedals is the setup this was clearly built around, and if you own one it transforms the bus routes into something close to meditative. Gamepad works, but Steam flags it as partial controller support, which in practice means budget a session for rebinding and expect some menu wrangling with mouse and keyboard anyway. Casual players should know up front that there is no arcade drift mode hiding under the hood. The reward loop is competence, not spectacle. Here is where it stings for me personally. The multiplayer is online only. There is co-op driving, there is PvP, and running a haul convoy with mates on a shared server is legitimately the best version of this game, with someone hauling cargo while another person runs the bus loop and a third one just crashes a taxi into a lamp post for entertainment. But there is no split-screen, no couch four-player, nothing you can spin up for people physically in your living room on a Saturday night. If your group is a Discord group, you are sorted. If your group is four people and one sofa, this one is not for you, and no amount of goodwill changes that. The other rough edges are real and worth naming. It launched in December 2021 and is still carrying the Early Access label, so expect jank: plain textures, occasional physics weirdness, an interface that was clearly designed by someone who already knew what every button did. There is no onboarding worth the name, and the opening grind of scraping together money in a slow car will lose a chunk of players before the good part starts. The near-universal player warmth around it (Very Positive across roughly nine and a half thousand reviews) makes a lot more sense once you understand that the people writing those reviews already survived the awkward first evening. Who should buy it? Anyone who liked the calm parts of trucking sims and wished there were more kinds of work to do, anyone who wants a driving game to unwind with rather than compete in, and anyone with a wheel gathering dust. Who should skip it? Players who need polish, players who need to be taught, and anyone shopping specifically for local multiplayer. Go in expecting a slightly scruffy second job that you actually look forward to clocking into, and it will happily eat a hundred hours of your life without ever raising its voice.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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