Truck Racing becomes more and more attractive! During the 1999 European Championship a new record was set with more than 600.000 visitors. And there will be even more visitors in the current season! Published by THQ and developed by Synetic "Mercedes-Benz Truck Racing" brings the whole Truck Race experience to your PC. In a cooperation with DaimlerChrysler AG a realistic simulation dedicated to quality and fun gameplay is about to hit the shelves. Did you know that Race Trucks reach a maximum speed of 160 km/h? MBTR features authentic design of european race tracks like the Nurburgring, A1 Ring in Austria or Zolder in Belgium.

The first thing that you will notice, are the graphics. They are absolutely stunning. I must repeat that. The graphics in this game kick some major booty. Very, very sweet. Unfortunately, this comes at a price.

The second thing you will notice is that you can't drive. At all. You will notice that your truck understeers, wipes out, does 180 degree turns and completely fails to obey polite requests to powerslide. However, this is no fault of the game: it is, indeed, purely none but your own. The game goes to great pains to accurately model the handling, performance and other characteristics of these 5 tonne, 1360 horsepower road kings. There is a pretty nice intro to truck racing in the game, which will give you a rough idea why they are so hard to handle.

But once you understand how the truck works and how to handle it more or less properly, you will find a wealth of options to help you fine tune it. Everything is flexible in the game: suspension, tyre pressure, anti-roll bars, shocks, springs, gear ratios, even the amount of diesel to load in the truck, for maximum enjoyment. Another aspect that is customisable is the opponent difficulty, though I'm not quite certain what that changed when I moved it from 80% to 1% - I was still getting slaughtered by the opponents, and I still had virtually no hope of catching up. There is much you can change in the options menu, too up till the regulatory 160 km/h speed limit.

So can I recommend this game to anybody? This is a new take on the racing genre, and lends itself to a great deal of enjoyment. However, I hesitate to recommend this to everybody: the learning curve is probably vertical, and mastering the handling of the trucks will be very difficult. I recommend turning on ABS, as it helps somewhat in the learning stage. The graphics are absolutely stunning, and the game displays a great degree of polished, skilful implementation of the Mercedes license.

Star Rating: HHHHI

Producer: THQ, Inc.

Required Spec:

Win 95

Pentium 133

24 MB RAM

10 MB Hard Drive Space

4 x CD-ROM

Graphics card with DX Driver