King of the Road (PC)

Guest Review by: James Dunn

Of all the games you could think of, I bet you couldn’t think of a game where you carry cargo around for money. You could? Oh, OK. How about adding some cars to the foray? See! It’s getting a bit harder now! Then mix in trucks, and you get King of the Road from JoWood.

Essentially, this game has you driving either a truck or car around a set of roads leading to cities to carry cargo for money. An interesting concept in a game, but does it live up to its geniality? Well…yes, and no.

Yes: Of all possible game concepts, a game about carrying cargo against the clock and against other possible trucks is a good one. For those who have played Rally Trophy, another of JoWood’s titles (and a very exceptional one at that), this is the same type of game. There are plenty of things to keep you occupied: The police can try to stop you for ignoring things like red lights; there are petrol stops if you need petrol; there can be enough opponents to race with, if they pick up the same cargo as you; there are speed cameras in certain places to amp up the difficulty; the sounds in the game are realistic; the music is low but good enough to be not too noticeable, since it is quite repetitive, although you can add your own music track to it instead, like GTA, and the music is good enough to be low like it would be in a truck.

No: The graphics could have been better (I have a 64MB card and I only have the option to have 16-bit depth, yet Hitman 2, which was released in the same year, allows me the full use of my 64Mb 3D card!); you have to, in most cases, switch off the engine in order for a truck that may collide into you to get past you (although, in the worst of cases, you’ll have to press Esc and click 911 to get the emergency services to put you right, and that is expensive); the opponents don’t seem to have good AI and have the uncanny ability to catch up to you at speeds you cannot do when they get left behind; and there doesn’t seem to be a difference between the arcade option and the simulation option.

All in all, the game has some playability and the value of being able to put it on and go trucking, yet, at the same time, has annoying gripes that should really be issued. Unfortunately, JoWood has no patches to resolve these rather irksome problems!