As a big fan of all manner of cooking shows, I’ve always enjoyed the ones featuring food trucks, competing in new cities and trying to win over new people with the allure of their culinary offerings. With their popularity and overall versatility in mind, I’m actually surprised that there haven’t been more attempts at games like this one, working to bring some of that hectic insanity to the masses in game form. With all of that in mind, I’d actually have preferred that Food Truck Simulator had hit it out of the park, but unfortunately in many regards it feels like a case where the owners should pack up and try their luck in some other industry.

Conceptually, with much less overhead of concerns like furnishing, cleaning, and maintaining a dining area or the staff to serve it, running a food truck should have a relatively light and precise focus on dealing with the customers and making great food. To some degree, the game at least makes a fair stab at that. Keeping in mind that this is a very full-featured sim you won’t be taking too many shortcuts getting around and plunking food on the grill, you’ll be moving to the fridge, choosing your ingredients, and then dealing with them very directly whether chopping the veggies, warming the buns, or grilling the burgers. The fact that the activity is a bit cumbersome shouldn’t be much of a surprise, in this sort of game that’s part of the design, and while not everyone may dig that it’s absolutely a style.

Where this same style of play runs into some trouble is that just because you’re tackling tasks in real time and manually doing everything yourself, that doesn’t mean there can’t be some quality of life boosts or at least options to make the experience less fiddly and painful. Moving your cursor around to highlight everything, especially when you’re trying to get things done as quickly and efficiently as possible, can be pointlessly picky and cumbersome. Some degree of lock on or assistance could have made a big difference, but instead you’ll need to simply hit your marks to execute most everything, and while it is doable collectively those moments add up to quite a lot of wasted time and effort that don’t make the experience better, only more tedious. All of the concerns about the controls then ignore the very dated presentation that’s not just awful to look at, feeling stuck a few generations in the past, but can also feel sluggish and encumbered, even as rough as they look on the whole. 

Stuff the visual shortcomings together with the sluggish-yet-picky controls and it’s an exercise in disappointment overall. More often than not, the focus is less on what you’re preparing, and the challenge of trying to work efficiently, and more on fighting to be sure you performed every mundane and repetitive step the best you could to simply keep things rolling. The variety in your tasks and how you get things done, found in most of the competition, comes up short for the most part here, making it hard to find an angle to make a case for its purchase. It’s different to a degree, but there are absolutely games that do this sort of thing better, even if not set in a food truck.