Platform: PC
Genre: Driving, Action, Humour

The isekai (“another world” in Japanese) trope and genre has been around the anime block for god knows how long, started by Tatsunoko’s Paul’s Miracle Adventure (1979) and popularised by Re:Zero, KonoSuba, and Overlord (depending on who you’re asking). So much so that making fun of the concept of getting literally knocked down to reincarnate in another fantasy universe is commonplace.

Developer Strange Scaffold decides to turn that concept into a full-fledged indie game, dubbed Truck-kun Is Supporting Me From Another World?!. In this mouthful of a game title, you play as a nameless truck driver -Truck-kun- who has to help a fledgling businesswoman named Carissa, whom you accidentally rammed into the isekai fantasy world. Now a muscle-bound paladin-type warrior, she needs to kill monsters so that she grows via experience points and gain stars to help get her back to the real world.

As Truck-kun, you help out by knocking down pedestrians and objects in succession, doing sick drifts, and go on a lam while ramming down armoured cop cars with your truck. For each person you knock down, you send a monster to the isekai for Carissa to fight and gain XP from. Oh, and you also deliver packages from time to time since that’s your other job; think Crazy Taxi but with boxes instead of passengers.

Drive On

In fact, the entirety of this game is structured like the Sega classic arcade driving title: you are given a minute and a half to do all those objectives & stunts I mentioned earlier. They’re dished out in parts of 3; complete one and it’s replaced with another. You basically do as many as you can to earn stars before time runs out. You have to meet a quota of Stars to progress the story, but fret not: even if you don’t get many on your first run, you can just keep on playing more and more runs until you hit the cap. The plot itself is rather cute and comedic; Carissa and Truck-kun talk about how nonsensical the situation is while talking about corporations not being the nicest place to work with, as well with a bunch of talk about classism. If anything, the narrative is wholesome enough for you to progress through the game.

Once you’ve had a run or two, you’ll then start to see the game’s repetitive structure. Just keep doing stunts and whatnot on the same kinds of map in different sections, find appropriate spots with the objects you want to ram down in case a new quest involving certain destructibles pop up at random, and deal with the physics and handling of the truck. It does get old after less than an hour, with only the story and the fate of our two protagonists being the driving (heh) force of this arcade title. Still, you could do worse than spend RM49 on this PS1-looking one-trick pony just for that weekend.

Final Score: 60/100

Review copy provided by publisher.