A few years ago I reviewed a game called King of the Road. My main motivation for doing so was that it seemed like quite an original idea, and the prospect of doing some normal, open-world driving without distractions like speed boosts, handbrake turns and jumps was fairly appealing.

Unfortunately the game was a bit dull and also lacked a little polish, but it was interesting enough for a while, and I was glad to have covered something a little unusual that hadn’t been done to death before or since. This mild self-satisfaction soon dissipated upon my later discovery of the prolific 18 Wheels of Steel series, and the fact that there had been numerous lonely truck driver games released between the time that King of the Road came out and the point at which I came to write my review. Ahem.

Whether any of them are any good, I don’t know – I’d lazily assumed not, to be honest, and my KOTR experience didn’t prompt a rush to find out for myself – but my head was recently turned by one of the writers from Rock, Paper, Shotgun speaking of a game called Euro Truck Simulator 2 in fairly glowing terms.

At first, I thought it was a big joke, especially given the extremely un-promising reputation of any game with the word ‘simulator’ attached. But, according to Metacritic, it seems not.

The trailer seems to be simultaneously taking the piss while also making the game look quite appealing:

The guy from RPS seemed quite taken with it, too.