PS4 Review: Food Truck Simulator

Does this food truck deserve a five-star review?

Renovate, equip and restore the shine of the food truck that belonged to your father. Create recipes, cook the food and serve customers across an entire city. Customize and upgrade your food truck to reach more customers and expand your menu.

Food Truck Simulator is exactly what it sounds like. You can customise your truck, buy equipment and ingredients, drive your truck to locations to serve customers and so on. The city is open world and has a number of collectibles to find in it as well. But just how well does the grill work?

You are limited to cooking burgers, pizza, fried food and sushi. Which sounds like a weird combination for a food truck to be honest, but the actual mechanics of it are pretty simple. What doesn’t help is the cumbersome controls and the poor optimisation for consoles when trying to do something simple like select a burger bun and place it on a chopping board becomes a pain.

You need to cook your food to the customer’s specifications, so the burger might have to be well-done for example. Keeping an eye on that while trying to get everything in place like the salad, cheese and buns is tricky, so you really need to keep an eye on things. It’s trickier than it looks, but luckily the board behind you will highlight what items you need and also what ones you have already got prepared.

Driving around the city itself is perhaps the worst element of the game. The visuals are incredibly poor here and roads tend to load as you go, so it feels like the game is loading alongside you as you keep driving. It doesn’t help that the game’s actual loading times are incredibly long, so it makes me wonder exactly what was loading in the load screen when the performance here is this poor?

The framerate is inconsistent and there are plenty of visual bugs, texture loading issues throughout. The soundtrack is decent and there is a nice story here, it’s just a shame it’s hindered by such performance woes.

The Verdict

Food Truck Simulator has some good ideas and a decent story, but more problems than it should have. The controls are awkward which makes micro-managing more complex than it needs to be, the visuals are weak and the performance is incredibly poor. If this was an actual food truck, Health and Safety would shut it down.

Score: 5.5