 more controllers |
| Review Date: June 1, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Arthur Gregory, |
| could have used more controller options for 2 of the 3 games other than that it works fine and it works with vista both versions |
Disappointing
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| Review Date: May 26, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Mike, Long Island, NY |
With the 18 Wheels of Steel franchise, I was looking forward to this new addition from Valusoft. Weeks after it was announced, I was happy. Unfortunately, it was short lived. I thought this was one game on a DVD and something new. Half right and half wrong.
Was this something new? Yes
Is it one whole game? No
Did the franchise take a step back? Yes (18 WoS: Convoy was a step back)
Adding a new twist to the 18 Wheels of Steel franchise, is the opporutinty to be the boss of a bus company. You also get the opportunity to own your own garbage collecting company. You even get to own your own trucking company. Here's the twist.....It is 3 seperate games. You get 18 Wheels of Steel: American Long Haul, Big City Rigs: Bus Driver ( not to be confused with Bus Driver by Merscom) and Big City Rigs: Garbage Truck Driver.
Bus Driver is extremely buggy. cars will come out of no where and "land" on your bus. You would be stuck and have to quit the mission. You get different buses, but they pretty much have the same bells and whistles. The cities that you drive through, are more cardboard than alive. Picture the cities in American Long Haul, then shrink them by half, and finally, lower the graphic quality by three-quarters. Very Disappointing. To earn money, you charge a price to enter the bus, and drive along the route, shown on the map that is visible. The green dots show where you have to pick up passengers. A few times, I honked the horn and a car out of no where, lands on my bus and I'm stuck. To put it mildly, Bus Driver is very buggy. It gets boring after some time also. To make money you have to run the same bus line several times before you can purchase a new bus in your fleet. The tours which you can also run, are buggy also. I was doing one tour and when I stopped at a location that was showing on the map as a dot, nothing happened. I drove a round a few times and even passed by the marker several times; nothing. Then time ran out. Again, very frustrating. The only thing less frustrating is that the traffic lights are slightly longer (when green) than in American Long Haul and Haulin.
Big City Rigs: Garbage Truck Driver doesn't have the bug problem as Bus Driver but the graphics are pretty much the same; bland. In Garbage Truck Driver, again, you own your own company and get to buy a garbage truck that is needed for the "morning run" (basically substitute the game, Bus Driver's passenger bus line runs for garbage cans). You buy trucks to go along with the mission that requires a specific garbage or recyclng truck. The cool thing is that you have a man or men, jump off the truck, go to the garbage, and bring it and empty it into the truck. The animation stops at when you have the garbage pail or garbage reach the truck. You don't see the animation of the garbage into the truck. You just see the garbage being thrown or emptied in. No hydraulics pushing the garbage, or showing if your truck is full. You don't even empty the truck at the end of the mission. These are a few of my gripes, but then again, I am a realism nut, so others will have a difference in a opinion. Same thing happens in this game also: you have to do multiple runs to earn money and then buy other trucks.
For 18 Wheels of Steel: American Long Haul, see my review of it on the 18 Wheel of Steel: American Long Haul product page here on Amazon. I got this even though I have ALH because of the special $[...] price. Basically, you get 3 games for $[...]. Instead of buying Bus Driver and Garbage Truck Driver for $[...] each (digital download), I got them both for $[...] (or less than that actually).
The police won't pull you over in Garbage Truck Driver and Bus Driver. You will be penalized in your bank account. Basically, it seems like both Garbage Truck Driver and Bus Driver were stripped down versions of American Long Haul concerning graphics and trucks were replaced with Buses and Garbage Trucks. The driving area is not as big as American Long Haul either.
Be warned: Bus Driver is buggy. Garbage Truck Driver will be somewhat disappointing and not hold your attention for long. American Long Haul is great, if you don't have Haulin. If you have 18WoS: Haulin, American Long Haul, is basically, the same thing.
I gave this 3 stars because the true rating in my honest opinion would be a 2.5 stars. Both Garbage Truck Driver and Bus Driver are new while American Long Haul has been out for a year. Bus Driver is very buggy and when the bugs aren't hurting the game, it gets boring. Garbage Truck Driver isn't as buggy but the same thing happens.....it just doesn't keep you in the game long enough.
For American Long Haul in my product review, I would love to see American Long Haul get an overhaul. This would include lively cities, more routes (secondary streets and highways), and to be able to get out of your truck. I'd love to get out of my truck and pump the gas or go to a truck wash. It would be nice to "go home" in the game to rest or actually go into a motel/hotel to rest. I would also love to be able to have workers load or unload the merchandise or products that I am hauling. How cool would it be, when you haul the new cars to the dealership and actually drive the cars off your trailer and onto the lot as well as giving the bill to the dealership. It would be amazing to have time off and go "home" and drive your car around to get food or you can use the time at home to pay bills. If it proves to be difficult to put real-life cities, then put fictional cities. But we have to remember that Valusoft tries to keep costs down ($[...] and under). Hopefully another company can go above and beyond. If ALH was overhauled, improved, and given more content, I wouldn't mind paying $[...] or even $[...]; if it's worth it.
*update*
I realized that 3 stars was very generous. I wish I can change it to 2 stars. Bus Driver and Garbage Truck Driver are a complete mess. If you have a passing interest in driving a bus, Bus Driver by Merscom is better. I'm still waiting for RignRoll.
*I'm running this on Vista Home Premium 64bit OS* (Intel i7 920 built by me)<---see it in my Listmania section |
Awful, just awful!
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| Review Date: June 27, 2010 |
| Reviewer: M. Harris, |
| Do not buy this game. The garbage truck and bus games are poorly designed. This shows that the company did not put much effort into this one. Their other games are pretty good, why not this one. I don't understand why they even released this junk! They wasted CD's, cases, and paper, as well as time on this game. American Long Haul is okay, but I could not download the patch onto it to fix annoying errors. The reason why I gave this 2 stars instead of one is because of American Long Haul, but a game of its quality should not be put with the two others. Do NOT buy this game!!!!!!!! |
Complete and total waste of time...
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| Review Date: July 26, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Flyboy, Yuma, AZ. USA |
As Reviewer "Mike" Said, the garbage truck and bus games are basically thrown in at the last minute... and also as this reviewer stated, I too was expecting to see Busses and Garbage trucks TIED IN to 18 WOS... this is not the case. There are three separate games on one disc, and the two Simulators (Garbage/Bus) are so utterly pathetic that they (Developers) may as well have not even bothered with them. In the simulators... if you can actually get them to work, your controls are slaved to the keyboard, your graphics are EXTREMELY low-end, as are the sound effects, and you just putz around switching between driver and crew. The civilians will get in your way every time (if you manage to park it in just the right position so that your view is not obscured by the completely useless camera controls) and you will be penalized if your crew so much as nudges them. As for the bus simulator, I never could get that program to go past crashing out at the initial load-screen... followed promptly by an error message stating I'm low on memory... even though my system specs EXCEED the standard requirements. (Dell Dimension 8300 Desktop running Windows XP Home, Sapphire Radeon 3850HD with plenty of system memory for this game).
As for 18 Wheels of Steel ALH itself. You've basically got three truck sound packages to cover about 30-40 trucks... that all handle pretty much the same, even when loaded. Only difference is, some trucks can turn on a dime... others are a classic pain in the arse. Did I mention you get Frisk, Whiplash etc... when you're... or at least I was... expecting Mack, Freightliner, International, Peterbilt etc... And where's that chintzy little panel truck they had in Hard Truck: 18 Wheels of steel 1?
The traffic lights are all essentially slaved together, and the green lights don't stay up nearly long enough to be anywhere near "realistic." That, and you hear a couple variations on three simple, stupid questions far too often to be tolerable... at least for me. "How's the weather lookin' up ahead?... Any hand got a Traffic Report up ahead... What's the 10-13 up ahead?" Those same questions are repeated like clockwork every few seconds and... for me. Being able to either shut off the CV Radio or at least disable the voice-overs... or both... would've been extremely helpful.
The weather? One minute it's pouring rain, the next it's sunny again. The traffic? If the AI "vehicles" don't pull out in front of you close enough to swap paint chips... they'll in behind you close enough for the other driver to be sitting in your lap... and provide near-constant irritation with the horn.
If they really wanted realism, then they shouldn't have programmed the game clock to run at warpspeed. "You are tired! You should stop and rest!"... so you pull over and advance time up to 24 hours... mere minutes later "You're tired!" again. And the cops nail you if you don't drop everything and park it... whether you're on a freeway overpass.. a bridge... or a city-street.
Almost finished. When you finally manage to get to the delivery location, you not only have to fight the camera controls to actually be able to "guide it (trailer) home"... but you also have to fight your truck to keep it steady.
Finally. If you're using a keyboard to control your truck, your controls will be ridiculously sensitive and you'll feel less like a veteran trucker and more like a crash-test dummy. If you're using a steering wheel without force feedback, you'll probably still have to fight the pedals to get the gearshift function to work. (Mine is a Logitech Wingman Formula Force GP w/Force Feedback... more on that another time).
They brag about realism on the back cover... and they completely and utterly fail to make good on it. All things considered, I'd say Big City rigs isn't even worth a third of the retail price. They've made so many different variations on the same game... you'd think they'd get it right once in awhile. I won't be recommending this to anyone, and I won't buy another 18 Wheels of Steel title until the game's developers stop messing around and get it right... for once.
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