Turns out driving a huge truck through zero-gravity space is pretty hard. Taking the popular haulage sim to its final frontier, Star Trucker tasks you with flying across the galaxy, delivering freight and maintaining your vehicle in challenging conditions.

Much of our time with the game has been spent on the regular difficulty, which finds a balance between the driving jobs you'd expect and keeping your truck in top form. That means refuelling, making rudimentary repairs, and replacing batteries in various onboard systems.

In the early hours, it can all feel a little overwhelming; just getting used to flying your truck is enough to worry about, but you'll soon have to don a spacesuit and fix hull breaches, or maintain the onboard gravity system, or top up your fuel. There's a lot of plates to spin, and it's as much a survival game as it is anything else.

Some will like that constant pressure, but we never got into a good groove; always short on money or essential resources, struggling to keep up with the game's robust but pretty demanding systems.

Fortunately, there's a good amount of flexibility, allowing you to tweak the difficulty to your liking. If you want to focus more on making deliveries and less on everything else, you can — and vice versa.

Flying about in zero-gravity takes a while to bed in; your vehicle feels suitably hefty, to the point it can be hard at times to avoid impacts with space debris or passing traffic. This alleviates after you get a feel for it, but again, early on it can be frustrating.

As with all games of this ilk, though, there's a real satisfaction in mastering it. Successfully delivering your load after a long journey through several jump gates feels great, and there's some decent progression with a skill tree for new job types and lots of upgrades for your truck.

There's a fair amount of depth to Star Trucker if you have the patience for it, and it's all presented with pleasant visuals and Americana stylings that lend it a fun atmosphere. There are some potentially frustrating elements and it's tougher than you might expect, but there's a fulfilling and novel game here for sim fans.