The Slaverian Trucker

My friends ask how I, as a trucker, can come home and play a game about driving trucks. My response is that this game is like the dream life for us. Profitable routes, nice scenery, a good selection of affordable trucks to buy, and plenty to do when you don't feel like hauling. You can hunt, build a rally car, search for new engines, wheels, suspension, etc for your truck/trailer, or do favors for the locals and earn their trust. This is a great game that deserves so much more attention.

I have spent so many hours playing this game and i keep coming back. I am not even good at the game. It just fills this void inside of me that makes me happy.

A standout entry in the 'deliver stuff and don't die/break your car while doing it' genre, and far more than the sum of its parts.
The Slaverian Trucker fits a neat middleground between the heavily in-depth car customization and mechanics of My Summer Car and the simpler but larger-scale The Long Drive. The controls are clunky and take time to get used to, but once you find some binds you're comfortable with, the game is very fun to drive in even on keyboard and mouse. The world of a late 80's post-apocalypse Eastern Europe lends itself to some grungy, ramshackle aesthetics that fit well with the rough and worn Soviet-era trucks and cars you'll be driving, and there are a number of things to do even without hauling heavy cargo. Having a smoke under a tree and getting oriented while scouting out new routes in the wastes, completing quests from NPC's for extra cash, testing your car's horsepower on the dynograph in Komsodrinsk, doing rally time trials on mountain roads, betting on the weekend dog races in Saversk, or sneaking around police patrols while transporting high-value drugs or illegal arms, there is enough variety to provide a good break from the usual long-haul gameplay.
Slaveria's mountainous geography and winding roads will be your most common challenges, especially while carrying shifting cargo like ores or wood planks that punish you for sudden, jerky moves or poor choice of gearing. Overland routes across the desert can often be more straightforward, but become much more challenging with heavier or unstable loads that don't like taking the many bumps and hills at speed compared to the flatter, consistent roadways. The vehicles themselves are modeled deeply enough, without the individual nuts-and-bolts construction of My Summer Car but extensive in interactivity, ease of use, and customization potential for your particular needs.
Scavenging and exploring provides lucrative opportunities to get expensive items and components for free, and parts between different trucks can be kitbashed together either out of personal preference or outright desperation. In addition, truck beds and saddles for trailers can be adjusted and replaced for better performance and compatibility with various cargo, keeping even your starter truck relevant while progressing further. With the constant need to watch out for your engine's oil, radiator coolant, fuel, and weight distribution, as well as the player's needs for water and food, The Slaverian Trucker is a game that rewards preparation and punishes carelessness even as you acquire new vehicles and get used to the landscape of the game world.
It is an imperfect, often janky game, but forgivable due to the dev team consisting of a single person and being sold at a low, fair price. There are annoyances, such as the police operating on a proximity system at time of writing where illegal cargo is automatically seized and crushing fines dished out within 50 meters of a patrol car or checkpoint, unintuitive controls for personal inventory and weapon equipping, odd character models and reused assets from storefronts making the bulk of the visuals, as well as long load times especially while loading previous save states. Nevertheless, the fundamental driving and resource management gameplay is solid enough to be worth sinking time into despite rough appearances.
The Slaverian Trucker is not an experience everyone will find stimulating, but for those who like automotive sims and especially fans of series like Euro Truck/ATS or My Summer Car, it is an addictive alternative that cannot easily be replicated elsewhere. Slaveria is a rough country, with a broad sandbox asking to be explored further. It deserve proper attention, especially as the game inches towards a full release out of Early Access.
A full recommendation, and a benchmark for what can be done by a single person with some free time and a focused vision.

TL;DR: Kinda special open world fixed economy physics based arcade trucking game made by a very passionate single developer, is not comparable to My Summer Car, very wide, kinda shallow sandbox, but fun and very special atmosphere. 3/5 stars.
This game cant be compared to my summer car, so disregard reviewers that do that. My Summer Car is an authentic experience of being a young male finn in mid 90s rural finland, and you get a really detailed recreation of the Datsun 100A you get to build and customize at a very detailed level, the engine itself requires you to actually get it to know and it takes a lot of real time effort getting the thing to run correctly. You have none of the fidelity of vehicle simulation in this. I guess most people dont play MSC correctly (no mods, no premade saves, permadeath, only way if you ask me) anymore because "rural looking area where you can do some stuff" isnt what MSC is (just) about, the life sim is secondary to the car maintenance sim. This game has lower fidelity of car maintenance simulation than some car "games" for DOS, abstract percentage for health of engine, wheels, suspension, you use repair points from a "repair kit" item that can repair both engine and radiator, wheels and suspension.
It is absolutely not where you will find the charm in this, it is elsewhere. It is better compared to Eurotruck simulator, or Motortown, with some very janky Fallout New Vegas inspired setting and side-gameplay and some kinda unpolished and sparse late 00s/early 10s stalker mod levels of gameplay depth and experience. The game does feel like a passion project, though it really needs some polish, even for jank.
This game is slavjank, it feels very much intentionally so. The world doesnt feel very slavic, though, more like if Fallout: New Vegas was made by The Long Drive dev and that life of Boris guy. It is a strange mix of dully shaded assets intended for two second survival jank flips. There is deformable terrain and an economy that is very easy to find extremely profitable niches in that never disappear because the game economy never really varies. You can drink beer, but you dont get drunk, you can piss, but you dont die if you dont pee, and there is no penalty for peeing the wrong place, like on cops or into the face of a homeless person. There are cigarettes, they do nothing, you dont even really need to sleep, you cant really die from hunger even on longest hauls.
Also if you want to get into any of the fnacy stuff, you will need to kill a dog, it is not like in Postal 2 where you can throw a dog treat to non-violently pacify a dog. Kinda sucks, that part.
Where the game really shines is in its atmosphere, it feels less like a trucking sim or a car mechanic sim, or even a post apocalyptic RPG and more like a Life of Boris "that totally happened" slav-themed tall tale generator, set in a world that reminds me of the desert in Xavier: Renegade Angel if it had an MDMA comedown hit too hard. It is a fun walking-with-wheels simulator, you can do whacky stuff, there is a bit of a physics puzzle element to trucking and salvaging the other vehicles you want. You need to explore to figure out things because the wiki cant keep up. The dev seems friendly any nice.
Cant wait for the dynamic economy to become a thing, also I would wish the game was harder, much harder, the updated engine you start out with has way too good performance both thermal and torque-wise. I would wish cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, etc had actual addiction and actual uses to it. I would wish parts wore out faster, I would wish I could take apart the engine. I would wish the fuel economy was wood gas and ethanol based instead of fossil fuel because fossil fuel extraction just doesnt make sense in an apocalyptic world. I would wish travelling the roads was actually dangerous, I would wish I actually took damage and died from crashes, I only just recently dsicovered that mesh of truck can even be deformed and it wasnt after tumbling for hundreds of meters down a mountain, or head-on collission with speeding truck, or slamming into a lightpole at 100+ km/h, it was from an NPC car lightly tapping me on the corner of my truck after I backed out unto a road and didnt see it slowly approaching me.
There are no raiders, the cops do nothing but look intimidating, even if you ram their cars out of this plane of existence nobody comes to even give you as much as a small fine of 100 slaverian dollars.
There are many things I would wish with this game, because for now it is just a mostly fun but very barebones low-fidelity half-sim physics based trucking arcade game set in a kinda delulu life of boris inspired post apocalyptic desert mountain island world. I give it 3/5. Will keep playing.

Great chill game that let's you drive and explore its world at your own pace. tldr: Similar to My Summer Car but less autistic engine disassembling

Pretty cool game, so far I've learned that Romanians are dirty, homeless, drug dealers, and I'm all for it! I turned my truck into a camper and sell drugs and illegal weapons ( in game of course...). 10/10 if you have a healthy imagination and/or like to just chill and drive with the radio on.

I cannot understate how much I adore this game
from how the games style is done, to how shitty it's made to be, it's perfect without a doubt reminds me of beloved games like My Summer Car, and Mon Bazou with a completely different twist and aesthetic.
I recommend this game to anybody, I loved it when I played it, and i'm sure you will too.