The Slaverian Trucker

If you like games like The Long Drive and My Summer Car then this is the game for you. It has a lot of the aspects of both games but including a lot of the assets from The long drive but minus the annoying stuff. Unlike The Long Drive, this game has missions and stores you can go to to buy food, water and resources. Unlike My Summer Car, you can't die from stress and it's not anywhere near as complicated to maintain your vehicle. Aside from that, it's similar to both of those games because you start of with a house, some goodies and a jalopy to get you from A-B until you either upgrade it or switch to something else completely. I've only played this game for 5 hours at the time of this review but I've barely put a dent in traveling the map and I'm already in love with the rusty transport truck you start off with. the tires are bad and the engine is underpowered but there's something charming about how sh*tty it is.
Update: I still think the starter truck is my favorite. You can put the suspension from the Zakmat truck, the tires from the Zakmat truck, the Premium class 3 truck brakes, and the 7.0 Flint Diesel engine with the Big Brutus turbo and there isn't anything you can't do with the starter truck. But after 40 hours of playing and traveling the whole map, acquiring almost every vehicle and figuring out a very lucrative trade route that made money very easy to come by, I'm starting to find the game rather repetitive. It's a good game, it's worth the money but there is definitely a lack of content. I'd still recommend it but currently I might shelve it until some more updates start to come out. The good thing is that there seem to be regular enough updates so I'm sure I'll be back soon.
Also, if there are any devs that read this, I love the ability to make adjustments to my vehicles with the parts adjuster but may I suggest making parts a little more customizable in a future update? I moved my rear tires back on the RUS after adding the cab but not being able to adjust the brake and suspension locations make them a bit of an eye sore. Also, maybe add some toolboxes that can be added to the side of the frame under the cargo beds? Still a great game though, keep up the great work and I'm excited for the games future.

In simple terms; this game is very nice, and I really like it.
Maybe I'm just uber autistic, but mixing soviet era vehicles, the apocalypse(sorta) and some sort of old cold war era political system to control it all? Sign me up! Or if you really want to dumb it down, The Long Drive meets My Summer Car, maybe with the theme of Fallout: New Vegas. The driving is fun and engaging, and there is plenty to do. Quests too, if you can believe, building more of a world and the funnies that ensue. That, and it is very unforgiving and will punish you for being careless. Seeing all the towns, all with their own Slavic theme, ranging from the Balkans to Russia and beyond, seems the land of Slaveria is the true home of Slavs. The variety of tuning and vehicles available is really nice, each suiting any demand or play style that is desired, from rally cars to heavy haulers.
My only real complaints about the game is that there really aren't many instructions on what you can do and what to do. The tutorial, if it can called that, only really introduces how to take jobs from depots and that's really it. Coming back to quests, you better take a screenshot of that beginning quest line dialogue because that's the only info you will get over them. Even then, sometimes the info you get from them can be very vague. Furthermore, you only find out there are even quests in the game by accidentally stumbling into a NPC in a town. Good luck finding the other quests without humping every NPC you run into. Moreover, as said, you only get that one piece of dialogue saying you started it, and no way of tracking if it was completed, the progress or anything of the matter. Luckily they are not super long quests so if you know what you are doing, it should be ok. The hints are good and give a gist of what you need to do but don't tell you about selling misc word objects or items. For example, did you know you could sell the sheet metal and plywood? Me neither until my second play through. Oh and of course, less of the developers fault, but being a Unity game, CPU usage is higher than it needs to be for a game like this and the longer you have it open, the worse it'll run.
Despite those complaints, I really really like this game. There clearly was a lot of heart and soul put into this game, made by a developer who had a passion and put that into a vision. And from that vision, we got this game. I hope as of my writing, Sawyer keeps developing this game until it's completion and keeps making games in general. The Slaverian Trucker really does deserve more recognition, it is a true gem.

My inner Gopnik is fully crouched.
Full of character, fun, culture, kielbasa, and vodka - the main loop never strays too far from tried and true and improves on points of my summer car while also making the true euro truck simulator.
It is priced right at full price - buy it. Support these devs!

Less janky than Snowrunner. Better gearboxes. Better physics. Truck won't fall over every time you drive over a pebble. No need to winch every few meters... 10 times the fun at less than a 10th of the price!

Games are about memorable experiences and I've had a few with this game and I don't know how this dev packed this with so much character but they did.
I can tell the devs really put effort into this passion project. Such a pleasant atmosphere. I feel like I'm in this part of the world. The best trucking experience I've had is in this game driving uphill in the windy roads trying to drop off cargo. Finding someone stuck and taking his salt for delivery. Finding someone broken down, giving them a repair kit to be rewarded with drugs I get fined for later.
All this in a rain shower in the dark with headlights paving the way in 1st gear up the hill. Radio on switching between first and 3rd person views admiring the scenery.
The graphics aren't awesome but it's all put together so well.
Grab a beer and chill with this game for sure when you're in that mood.

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.

If you like trucking, games like my summer car / similar concepts then this game will be a blast for you. Great controls ,although mouse control could be a little bit better, not many bugs that I have encountered other than the usual things that happen with games that have physics like this and its fun. You have a instant save option which my summer car didn't have and that way the game isn't torture and absolutely fun. It already has a lot of things in it which will keep your fun levels at high. Looking forward to more updates and new content, keep the development pumping please
Also in other words, the absolute balkans driving simulator