East Bound and Down: A Love Letter to Euro Truck Simulator 2

The story has to start with The Wheel.

I am not a gamer who buys a lot of hardware and peripherals. I eventually get around to getting a console or two every generation, but I’m never first in line and I wait for the price cuts. I’m primarily a PC gamer, but I’ll go five years or more with older hardware – until a recent upgrade last year, I was limping along with an aging ten-year-old gaming laptop.

That’s not to say there haven’t been a few toys along the way. Until we finally cleaned out our closets and got rid of them, my wife and I had a stack of plastic guitars, a microphone, and a set of drums from our Guitar Hero / Rock Band era. I have an old flight stick that still (maybe) works.

But my pride and joy, and the peripheral I still use most often, is a G27 Logitech Racing Wheel I picked up sometime around 2014. 

At the time, I didn’t know anything about racing wheels. So I asked a co-worker – a guy who loves racing games and had invested in a great setup – what he recommended. The G27, which came with pedals and a shifter, was his first suggestion. 

“Not cheap, but it’s not top of the line – probably the best wheel for a novice,” he said. “It’s a great wheel, though. You get 900 degrees of rotation, which a lot of the other wheels don’t have. And the paddle shifters are immersive for racing.”

I nodded like I knew what he was talking about. I was a newcomer to this strange new world. I’d had my hands on a racing game a few times in arcades, but the genre didn’t appeal to me. I wasn’t a car fanatic. I don’t have the split-second reflexes needed for high-speed racing titles. 

So I took his advice and splurged on the G27. What I didn’t tell him until later was that I was buying a wheel peripheral entirely to play Euro Truck Simulator 2.

The Long and Winding Road(s)

Euro Truck Simulator 2 was built by SCS Software, a developer based in Prague that’s been around since 1997. The studio’s background is entirely in simulation games, including the old truck driving series 18 Wheels of Steel and the first Euro Truck Simulator, released in 2008. 

But Euro Truck Simulator 2 was where the studio finally broke out with a huge success. The game delivers exactly what you’d expect from the title – an open-world game about driving big trucks transporting goods from one city to another, all while exploring a sprawling open-world map.

The core truck driving simulation is robust and infinitely tuneable to taste. If you want to use a clutch and manually shift gears, you can; if, like me, you can only handle so much realism, there are several options. 

You can set how tippy your truck is going around corners, how much damage you’ll take from collisions, and whether or not you’ll pay fines for blowing through red lights. You can even set whether the trucks have the true-to-life mandatory speed regulator, limiting the top speed of the truck.

A light business sim adds context on top of the core gameplay and gives you a reason to keep playing. You are not just driving a single truck; you’re running an entire trucking company. You hire drivers, buy garages in different countries, and of course infinitely customize your fleet of trucks. 

I can hear the skeptics now – how is this possibly a fun experience for a hardcore gamer? You’re not racing, or killing zombies, or flying a spaceship. You’re driving a boring old truck, going the speed limit while hauling a big slow trailer loaded with frozen food or steel pipes. And though the game’s map scale has been reduced to a fraction of real-life distances, a single trip can take half an hour or more to complete.

Under Pressure

Yet there lies the magic of Euro Truck Simulator 2: it tickles the brain in ways most other games don’t. 

The bulk of any individual journey is easy. You’re kicking back, the truck on cruise control, perhaps a cold beer at your elbow (don’t drive a truck and drink in real life). Your choice of music is streaming from the game’s built-in radio system.

(Side note: I prefer classic rock stations to go with my Euro Trucking – a little AC/DC or The Who is perfect driving music for careening down the Autobahn. I know it’s time to quit for the night when Guns n’ Roses “Cold November Rain” comes around in the rotation.)

Those moments in the game are relaxing – zen-like. But then an exit comes up a little faster than you expect. You jam on the brakes and swerve to avoid backed-up traffic. Then there’s a detour. Then you arrive at the destination, and it’s a tight squeeze to back the truck into the unloading bay. Then, on your way out, you take an exit a little fast and roll the truck, costing you time and money. Adrenaline!

In between, you manage a few basic needs. You have to periodically sleep; you need to gas up the truck. You need to pay for repairs and tolls (and truck accessories and upgrades!) It’s lightweight, not burdensome at all, but it’s just enough to make your brain shift gears for a moment.

There’s an ebb and a flow to Euro Truck Simulator 2 that’s uniquely satisfying – a constant shift in how the player is feeling about the experience. Other simulators, like Flight Simulator, can approach this state of nirvana, but ETS2 has a decade of full-time development under its belt now. 

The experience, at every level, has been polished to near perfection.

Whole Lotta Love

To this day, Euro Truck Simulator 2 has a large, loyal customer base that any company would be happy to have. A game that launched with several “fake” truck brands has now locked in licenses from all the major truck manufacturers. If there’s a real-life modern truck you want to drive, it’s probably in the game.

And SCS Software is a company worth supporting. Still privately owned, they have grown to over 300 employees at work on Euro Truck Simulator 2 and its sister title, American Truck Simulator. (American Truck Simulator is also great fun, though it has fewer players.)

Both games have had a long shelf life, and both have a great library of robust DLC that adds genuine value. The best DLCs expand the giant maps even further – slowly stretching eastward from California across the midwest in the case of American Truck Simulator, and expanding outwards from the core European nations in ETS2. 

There’s a host of smaller DLC as well, ranging from special cargos to custom truck paint jobs and cabin accessories. (Who doesn’t want to throw a stack of magazines and a bobblehead in their sleeper cab?)

SCS has also demonstrated an unusually ethical approach to product development. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the team was nearing the end of development on Heart of Russia, the next large map expansion for ETS2 that would have extended the map further east. 

With a major studio investment of development resources at stake, most companies would have still launched a Russia-themed DLC on schedule – perhaps with a little last-minute rebranding or a token donation to Ukraine.

Instead, SCS Software canceled the release of the DLC and put out a remarkable statement. It’s a unique example of a company putting its money where its mouth is when it comes to activism.

On the Road Again

Every time I’ve sung the praises of Euro Truck Simulator 2 to my cynical game developer co-workers, I’ve been mocked. Had I not spent the hours trucking that I have, I’d understand it; it’s hard for folks to understand how it’s not just another cheaply-made niche simulator game.

I eventually confessed to the guy who’d recommended The Wheel that I’d bought it for ETS2. I think his racer’s heart broke when I told him I’d remapped the paddle shifters to the turn signals. (Traffic safety is important! When you’re driving the big rigs, always signal your lane changes.)

But I’m a Gen-X guy. When I was around eight, I saw Smokey and the Bandit with my dad. For about a year, I thought I wanted to drive the big rigs when I got older. Whenever we’d go on family road trips, I’d be on the lookout for eighteen-wheelers on the highway and try to get them to toot their horns as we passed by.

Like everyone else, I changed my mind about what I wanted to do with my life a dozen times between eight and eighteen. Truck driving is a tough job, physically demanding with long, lonely hours. (Huge respect for folks that make it their career.)

Still, there’s a fantasy and romance to it – true, not exactly the mystique that being a secret agent or a fantasy hero has. 

But truckers are lonely heroes of a sort, out there on the network of roads that connect humanity’s carved-out islands of civilization, carrying the goods that keep our modern society running through weather and pandemics and long detours. Thematically and mechanically, the game is satisfying in the same way that Death Stranding is.

For me, Euro Truck Simulator 2 played directly to the fantasies of that eight-year-old boy coming out of the theater after Smokey and the Bandit many years ago. It’s polished and chock-full of great content, and it’s been supported for a decade by a privately owned developer worthy of your gaming dollar.

So the next time you’re looking for something different to play – something that isn’t the usual crop of first-person shooters and fantasy RPGs – haul a load of cable up a steep grade through Austria, or back a box trailer of frozen food into a tricky unloading bay.

You might have more fun than you’d think.

Euro Truck Simulator 2 is on Steam and periodically goes on sale. American Truck Simulator is equally good if you prefer straight interstates and faster speeds.