Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World Review – Filler Arc

Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World is a simple, often shallow, arcade-style game that asks you to make repeated runs throughout its 3- to 4-hour story. Without any evolution across those handful of hours, it feels like grinding for grinding’s sake. While the narrative isn’t awful, it lacks enough connective tissue to make the repetitive vehicular rampages worth the effort.

After running over Carissa and sending her into an isekai, you’re tasked with helping her get back to the real-world before her new job starts on Monday. To speed up her journey to defeat the demon king, you need to help her level up by feeding her bad guys, collecting stars, and clearing milestones.

All of this is done in a run-based format, where you are set loose in the city in a time-attack, trying to complete tasks, evade cops, and earn more time to keep the run going. The individual tasks you need to complete to earn stars and time are randomized, running from hitting parked cars to drifting a certain number of meters, or even honking your horn over a hundred times. These tasks need to be done while you hit pedestrians to create monsters for Carissa to defeat and hit objects to power up her special move.

Unfortunately, that’s the whole extent of the experience. Each run quickly feels the same, with the only variety coming from the random tasks given to you. You can deliver packages and bash your way through special objects, but I quickly felt myself wanting for more, far sooner than credits. I also quickly found a rhythm with some of the tasks, like hitting parked cars. The number required could reach up to 25 late in a run, so I would just return to one of a handful of locations, like a parking garage. Needing to head to specific areas makes the already small play space feel even smaller, turning the task list into more of a chore list.

Your progress is marked by milestones that must be cleared to unlock the next piece of the story after completing a run. I got stuck grinding out a specific milestone, meters traveled while boosting, multiple times. You do continue to gain progress towards the milestones, so once I did four or five boosting-focused runs, I would get to go through the next handful of cutscenes without much effort, before being sent back to the boosting mines. Having to focus on a single milestone multiple times really strained my already limited desire to play multiple runs.

The gameplay focuses on driving around a small city, where you crash into almost everything. Some armored objects and cops have to be boosted or dashed into to defeat them, but otherwise the loop hits enough people to fill the enemy stack for Carissa before unleashing a special attack. Needing to quickly switch between hitting people and objects while zipping around the city was my favorite part of the gameplay, making it feel like I always had to be engaged in how I moved through the environment to my different tasks.

The only dynamic part of any given run is your heat level, which gradually increases as you complete tasks and run over pedestrians. This increases the number of cop cars coming after you, which you have to deal with by boosting or performing another maneuver, like a 180 turn. The cops don’t present much of a threat or challenge, except for when my boosts or dashes would actually register with them, forcing me to wait for a brief cooldown before trying again so I could get back to my objectives.

The character arc given to Carissa never quite goes beyond the premise of a career-focused person who has given up everything in order to succeed, although it does often have some fun dialogue, especially if you have any affinity for the type of anime being parodied here. It’s not a drag on the experience, but it also didn’t provide enough to make grinding through objectives feel any more rewarding. If the tedium of grinding objectives was meant to reflect Carissa’s experience in the corporate world, it certainly succeeded in making me want to quit.