Who hasn’t dreamed of driving around a food truck and serving the best damn burgers you ever tasted? I long to be the sweaty and slightly too hairy burger man delivering greasy delights to tipsy pedestrians as they walk home from bar hopping. Food Truck Simulator lets me live this fantasy and feel the heat of chopping onions before my buns burn. If you’ve ever wanted to live this dream with me then read on!
Food Truck Simulator is the latest “sim” style game out of DRAGO Entertainment, a Polish studio partnering with Ultimate Games publishing. From the team that brought you Gas Station Simulator, Treasure Hunter Simulator, Road Diner Simulator, and Motel Simulator, this mobile sustenance simulation game has landed on the Xbox platform. While the game itself leaves a fair amount of polish to be desired, there is a fun-loop here that is greater than the sum of its parts. 
You’ll serve food around the Westside Port. A coastal town reminiscent of the Bay Area of California whose hungry inhabitants have a variety of appetites for everything from burgers and fries to sushi. You play as the son of a legendary food trucker whose legacy you’re trying to live up to. There’s a quirky cast including a maternal grocery store owner and an eccentric Italian pizza man who will all help you to rebuild your food truck empire. While most of the communication is done through phone calls, It would have been nice to skip through some of the dialogue at times.
While in the story mode, you’ll quickly make a name for yourself as you fix up your dad’s truck and learn the ropes, however, it’s not long before a rival food truck owner sabotages your livelihood and leaves you to rebuild the pieces of your portable culinary dream. I was surprised by how invested I was in the story. The voice acting gets the job done and the protagonist is even pretty darn good at times. However, don’t expect the greatest story ever told and you won’t be disappointed.
Like all simulation games, it’s all about mastering the mechanics. Recipes start out simple and eventually grow to juggle cooking times and food preparations for multiple dishes at once. I found the pizza toppings to be particularly challenging since the ingredients were sometimes very small and the controls were clunky. Apart from chopping, grilling, and cleaning, there’s a meta-game of organizing your truck’s kitchen. I always preferred to separate ingredients into categories to reduce the amount of time opening and closing drawers. I also found myself deliberately not progressing on a tutorial in order to chop and prep ingredients before the truck officially opened. It feels gratifying to maximize your kitchen to see how efficient you can get.
I think because this is a simulation game, it’s understandable why the controls wouldn’t feel super tight. After all true to the genre, part of the game is developing the muscle memory of carefully chopping a tomato, spreading pizza sauce, and pumping gas all with some difficulty to make it feel more rewarding when you plan well and deliver the food on time. That being said, I would have preferred a little better adaptation to the controller. It’s a fine line to walk, but I never felt like a control mechanic was broken, and I particularly enjoyed the cleanup portion after each meal rush. Once you’ve learned the basics you can continue with the story or jump into the sandbox mode.
Graphically, it’s nothing to write home about, but I think the interior of the truck does a nice job of looking sharp and clean. Nevertheless, once you look outside your truck things will start to get a little basic. While the genre isn’t known for its killer visuals, the character animations, and pedestrian models are all pretty cooky cutter. That being said, game budgets are a real thing, and at a $19.99 asking price, I think it’s adequate. I did find it distracting at times when the same woman with a slightly different complexion all wanted different pizzas using the same voice.
Food Truck Simulator is cozy. It’s relaxing while still being rewarding. You can upgrade your garage and customize your truck to get increasingly better equipment and expand your menu. It’s the perfect podcast game that feels rewarding each time you can deliver more than one order at once and see your timer restart for a new order. While I think there are some quality-of-life improvements, particularly around the controls that could go a long way toward making the game more accessible to more people, it’s a fun escape. Visually there’s been some sacrifices, but I don’t see too many food truck games in the marketplace which is a little surprising given how gamified I imagine the work is in real life. As for this burger flipper, I’d happily recommend anyone interested get behind the wheel of Food Truck Simulator on Xbox.
