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Comment on [Discussion] New month, new games. What are you playing on your Deck? - February 2024

dumpsterlid@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

I am utterly addicted to an early access game called Motor Town: Behind The Wheel. It sells itself as a driving simulator kind of like if Euro Truck Simulator not only had semis but also taxis, box trucks, garbage trucks, tow trucks, busses, sedans, SUVs vans, sports cars etc… you name it.

There are many different ways to earn money in the game from pizza delivery to logging trucking to driving a garbage truck to urgent taxi rides.

Because you can heavily customize and tune each vehicle, including being able to drop ridiculously powerful engines into vehicles, it means that while this game doesn’t sell itself as a racing game necessarily, it is one of the most fun racing games I have ever played. When I do deliveries with my box truck I’m not playing a chill simulator, I am hurtling a box truck across fields and power sliding around corners.

The physics are superb and it is just a blast to race around in the vastly different feeling vehicles.

What seals the addictive feel to the game is that it has an autopilot feature where your vehicle will automatically drive to waypoints so you can interact with this game anywhere along a continuum from a sort of idle game all the way to a balls to the wall open world racing game.

If you are the kind of person that enjoys just racing around in GTAV aimlessly rather than doing missions or if you love open world racing games like Burnout Paradise or if you want to play Euro Truck Simulator with your friends and make convoys Motor Town is a blast.

Motor Town has multiplayer and it is really fun to be on the same road networks as people playing the game in a totally different way than you. A lot of times semis and trucks go by in autopilot, sometimes you pass someone driving a logging truck like an utter psychopath addicted to speed, sometimes you pass a player loading a broken down vehicle onto their towtruck, sometimes you are racing along and see someone else racing in their souped up car and a mini informal street race happens. It is my ideal version of a chill social game, especially because again the driving mechanics/physics are superb, it is hard to go back to other games after it.

Finally, it runs awesome on the steam deck particularly because of the low poly graphics style (that might fool you into thinking the driving mechanics are arcades but trust me they aren’t).

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TheBig2023Meltdown@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Gonna check it out, thanks!

I’m looking for a game with realistic handling where I can race down some roads with traffic. Asseto corsa with mods is perfect but it won’t run on steam deck!

How’s the controller support? The steam verification doesn’t look promising

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- dumpsterlid@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Controller support works no problem for me both with the steamdeck onboard controls and also with a gamepad when my steamdeck is docked.
  
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  - TheBig2023Meltdown@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I tried the demo, and I’m gonna be honest it ain’t for me
    
    The gameplay is fine, but it’s the UI, controls and stuff letting it down. Its not very polished. Probably just early stages of development.
    
    I had a frustrating start, trying to drive a broken vehicle for about 10minutes. I even googled why I couldn’t start the engine. Then I got out and saw the icon indicating broken car. Yeah it’s me being dumb but a well built game would think of this and help the player if they’re trying to start a broken car
    
    I stopped playing after about 30mins, the initial frustration used up too much of my patience
    
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    dumpsterlid@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah I think you found a vehicle for the towing job that is purposefully broken down to make it a challenge to tow (I.e. the right front tire is totally flat so you have to lift the front with a winch for the tow).
    
    Sorry you had a bad experience, it is definitely early access, I normally never recommend early access games it’s just there aren’t really any fleshed out alternatives of open world driving games with realistic physics and a large open worlds that even remotely try to do what Motor Town does.
    
    Yeah there are open world racing games, but that doesn’t really get at the vibe of Motor Town with all these vastly different kinds of vehicles and jobs all happening together at once. The closest peers like Forza or Beamng just don’t understand the basic gameplay loop of why Motor Town works so well, so while you might be able to get somewhat of a similar experience to parts of Motor Town elsewhere, even at this stage of development I think Motor Town provides a really unique fun that for a certain type of person is going to an extremely addicting and fun experience.
    
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    MajorHavoc@programming.dev ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    The gameplay is fine, but it’s the UI, controls and stuff letting it down. Its not very polished. Probably just early stages of development.
    
    Yeah. This is definitely a game style I want, but I’ve been spoiled by the driving and controls polish in games like Saint’s Row.
    
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Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This isn’t my kind of game, but it sounds exactly like the kind of game my son would love. Thanks for sharing, I can’t wait to show it to him after work.

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- dumpsterlid@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  If your son is of the kid type “loves big machines that adults use to do work with” he will absolutely be obsessed with this game, I would have played the shit out of it when I was a kid. Wait I am playing the shit out of it, am I still a kid…?
  
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vala@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Steam makes it sound like this doesn’t run that well on the SD. Is that true?

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- dumpsterlid@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  If you crank the settings yeah it won’t run well, but at lower settings that game runs fine even online in a multiplayer server with 30 people (though the net code is still a bit rough but that isn’t the steamdecks problem).
  
  Because the graphics are stylized as low poly you are getting a whole lot of very advanced unreal engine physics delivered in a very resource efficient package.
  
  Another good vehicle game that is fabulous for the steam deck is Offroad Mania. Opposite kind of game, very small bite sized rock crawling levels and procedurally generated endless obstacle runs. The game has superb physics, low poly graphics and runs like butter on the deck.
  
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