Hands-on: Road Kings has its sights on American Truck Simulator

The Euro Truck and American Truck Simulator games have dominated the trucking simulator for years, and have remained largely unchallenged – until now. Enter Road Kings, a surprise new truck driving simulator from Saber Interactive, the makers of SnowRunner, Expeditions: A MudRunner Game and RoadCraft.

Announced at Gamescom Opening Night Live just three months after RoadCraft’s release, Road Kings sees you completing deliveries across the American South in South Georgia and North Florida, managing jobs and building your reputation as your trucking empire expands. You’ll be hauling cargo across highways, cities and rural roads in licensed trucks from Mack and International.

Development of the new trucking simulator is being handled by staff who worked on Dakar Desert Rally at Saber Porto, as well as developers who helmed SnowRunner and Expeditions.

During a hands-on preview at Gamescom, we played Road Kings on an elaborate Hori setup. With a full-size steering wheel, a shifter with up to 18 gears and a control system with dozens of buttons, we were fully immersed in the trucking world.

A perfect storm

Navigating challenging conditions is a staple of Saber’s simulation games like SnowRunner. But here, it’s noticeably more cinematic.

In the first story act of the demo, we returned home from our first day of work at a logistics company. Along the way, we encountered a raging storm on the highway. With torrential rain and tornadoes ravaging the city, it was an impressive showcase of Road King’s impressive dynamic weather effects.

Saber tells us that Road Kings aims to replicate scenarios that real truck drivers encounter, though the extreme weather seemed over the top. As we dodged rolling cars and crossed collapsing bridges, the scenario played like a dramatic action setpiece from a Roland Emmerich disaster film. It’s a contrast to Road King’s more grounded delivery missions.

After surviving the storm, time skips forward to a point where we have left the logistics company and were out on our own, exploring the town looking for jobs. Using a GPS, you have to find a job, accept it and set a route before driving to a location to pick it up. 

Each job has a star rating. If your reputation is too low, you can’t accept a job below your star rating. Once you reach the destination, you then have to park up and attach the payload for delivery, earning a higher reputation if you park accurately.

On the surface, Road Kings plays like a traditional truck simulator. Transporting jobs, which play like fetch quests, can be stacked, allowing you to pick up two deliveries from the same location and drop them off in order. After completing a job, clients will give you a star rating. If you have a higher star rating, you may get away with more errors. As you start as a rookie driver in a beater truck, you’ll also encounter rivals who want to steal your jobs.

Breaking traffic laws, such as running red lights or exceeding the speed limit, is discouraged and can harm your reputation with the police.

Life on the road

But what sets Road Kings apart from other truck games is how it simulates the work life of real truck drivers. In keeping with real-world limits, you must manage your time carefully and take mandatory breaks. A timer on the HUD indicates your hours of service and when you need to make sleep stops.

As with real-world truck driving laws, your shift can’t exceed 14 in-game hours. Going over your time allowance can result in a fine. Likewise, you can also get fined if your truck’s payload is too heavy when visiting weighing stations.

Mercifully, the lifestyle elements seem less grating than the dismal Alaskan Road Truckers, where you have to make stops to eat.

Driving with heavier payloads affected our truck’s handling, resulting in longer braking distances and making us more likely to make mistakes. If you run over a pothole with a full load, you can even get a tyre puncture. Damage to components like the brake pads can be monitored, though turning on the engine brake can help reduce wear on the brakes.

While our hands-on time was limited, the gameplay loop of taking on jobs and managing your time was engrossing, and we’re intrigued to see how the campaign pans out. The campaign is expected to last around 10 hours, but there’s no limit on the number of jobs you can complete.

With a release planned for PlayStation and Xbox, there’s a sense that Saber was banking on Road Kings filling American Truck Simulator’s void on consoles. It’s unfortunate, then, that SCS Software made the surprise announcement that both American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator are heading to consoles, although neither has a release date yet.

As a result, the race is on for Road Kings to hit consoles before American Truck Simulator. While it has a smaller scope, Road Kings looks like a worthy challenger from our brief hands-on, offering a compelling new take on truck driving simulations.

Road Kings is slated for release in 2026 on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. A closed beta is also planned in the coming months- you can register your interest on Focus Entertainment’s website.