Truck-kun Review: Yes, You Actually Run People Over for XP
- Niels Gys
- Jul 29
- 5 min read
Quick Verdict
Yes, the joke is real.
Truck-kun Is Supporting Me from Another World?! genuinely lets you drive the legendary isekai delivery truck, mow down pedestrians, smash property, attract police attention and turn the resulting carnage into progression for an elf warrior fighting monsters in another world.
This is not an anime gag stapled onto an ordinary driving game.
Running people over is part of the progression system.
Pedestrians you hit become enemies for Carissa to fight. Destroying objects helps charge her special attack. Causing chaos increases police heat. The game rewards behaviour that would normally end with three helicopters, seventeen lawyers and a documentary narrated in a disappointed voice.
The problem is that the joke has more legs than the game underneath it.
The roughly three-to-four-hour campaign takes place on one relatively small city map and repeatedly asks you to perform variations of the same destruction, delivery and driving objectives. Some critics loved the lunacy. Others found the loop shallow and increasingly repetitive.
Brilliant premise. Real playable menace. Very funny systems. Limited depth.
This is a wonderful little traffic offence, not a criminal empire.
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What the Hell Is This?
Carissa Ward is accidentally run over by Truck-kun and transported into another world, where she becomes an elf warrior who needs to defeat the Skeleton King and obtain a resurrection scroll.
Naturally, the driver decides to help.
Not by finding a wizard. Not through interdimensional diplomacy. Not by developing even a rudimentary understanding of remorse.
You help by running over more people.
Those unfortunate pedestrians are transported into Carissa's fantasy world as enemies she can kill for XP.
Every successful vehicular assault becomes outsourcing.
You aren't killing pedestrians. You're providing overseas employment opportunities.
What You Actually Do
Most of the game takes place during timed runs around Wenvale. You drive, boost, drift, jump, make deliveries, smash cars and environmental objects, complete randomized objectives and turn unsuspecting civilians into involuntary participants in the fantasy economy.
Completing objectives earns stars and extends runs. Destroying the environment charges Carissa's special attack. Running over pedestrians produces enemies in her world.
Cause enough trouble and police heat increases. The police chase you, interfere with objectives and can themselves be dealt with using your truck.
The result is closer to an arcade destruction game than a conventional delivery simulator. Crazy Taxi went through a difficult adolescence and came home wearing bloodstained anime merchandise.
There's also free roam for anyone who considers objectives an irritating restriction on their constitutional right to flatten municipal infrastructure.
The Villain Fantasy Is Real
This is where Truck-kun becomes much more interesting for CRIMENET than its ridiculous title suggests.
Plenty of games advertise being dangerous or morally questionable, then spend forty hours asking you to save farmers and reunite lost children with emotionally supportive goats.
Truck-kun does not suffer this identity crisis.
The game mechanically rewards antisocial behaviour.
Run someone over? Useful.
Destroy property? Useful.
Escalate police attention? Part of the loop.
The protagonist's motivation isn't straightforwardly evil because the rampage is supposedly helping Carissa return home. Mechanically, however, you're still operating a delivery vehicle as an interdimensional meat catapult.
Intent is doing heroic amounts of legal work here.
That makes Truck-kun a natural fit beside CRIMENET's Games Where You Play As The Villain coverage.
You aren't watching somebody else behave appallingly. The game repeatedly makes being a monumental public menace materially advantageous.
The fantasy isn't cosmetic.
The Dark Humour Is the Real Star
Running pedestrians over could have been nothing more than shock humour. Instead, the game builds an absurd progression system around it.
Victims become enemies.
Enemies become XP.
Property destruction fuels attacks.
Police attention becomes another arcade obstacle.
Casualties are resources. Property damage is mana. Police attention is difficulty scaling.
Somewhere, Satan has opened Excel.
That's why the comedy works. The darkness isn't merely sitting in dialogue waiting to say something naughty. It's built into what your hands are doing.
Where the Joke Runs Out of Road
The biggest concern is repetition.
The campaign uses one relatively small city environment, and its core loop doesn't evolve dramatically across its short runtime. You're repeatedly driving, destroying, delivering and completing variations of familiar objectives.
That simplicity works while the chaos remains entertaining.
Once the novelty fades, the structure becomes much easier to see.
And the structure is wearing very little clothing.
Randomized objectives can also frustrate when the necessary target or opportunity isn't conveniently available.
That's particularly dangerous in a game built around immediate arcade gratification. When your fantasy is “drive through civilisation like a caffeinated insurance claim,” hunting around for the correct billboard or delivery target is rather like stopping halfway through a bank robbery to complete a customer satisfaction survey.
Police interference creates a similar problem. Pressure can make the destruction more exciting, but it can also disrupt specific objectives at exactly the wrong moment.
That's the difference between chaos enhancing a sandbox and chaos sitting on your keyboard.
The Reception Is Already Split
Early Steam reaction is strongly positive, but the launch-day sample remains too small to call that settled consensus.
Professional reviews are much less united. Some praised the humour, writing, arcade destruction and commitment to the premise. Others argued that the game runs out of meaningful mechanical ideas before its roughly three-to-four-hour campaign ends.
Both reactions fit the same game.
If boosting around Wenvale, smashing things and weaponising pedestrians stays funny, Truck-kun can sustain its modest runtime. If you need systems to meaningfully evolve, those familiar objectives may start feeling old remarkably quickly.
There is no strong evidence of widespread catastrophic technical problems. Criticism instead centres on things such as steering sensitivity, frustrating police interactions and the lack of button remapping at launch, with remapping reportedly planned.
So this doesn't appear to be broken.
It's simply a small game with one magnificent joke and limited places to drive it.
Who Should Play It?
Play Truck-kun Is Supporting Me from Another World?! if the phrase “Crazy Taxi, except pedestrians become fantasy XP” immediately improves your afternoon.
Its strongest audience is anyone who enjoys short arcade experiences, destruction and dark humour where the joke is mechanically reinforced rather than merely shouted from dialogue boxes.
Skip it if repetition ruins games quickly for you, if you need substantial mechanical progression, or if one small map sounds claustrophobic.
No amount of vehicular manslaughter can manufacture additional systems.
Verdict
Truck-kun Is Supporting Me from Another World?! is exactly as stupid as its premise sounds, and I mean that as genuine praise.
The developers took one magnificent idea, turning Truck-kun into an actual gameplay system where flattening pedestrians directly helps somebody grind XP in another dimension, and committed to it.
The limitation is that the game apparently doesn't build enough beyond that idea. The small map, repetitive objectives and limited mechanical evolution leave the novelty carrying an enormous amount of weight.
For some people, it clearly does.
For others, the tyres will be bald before the credits arrive.
CRIMENET Verdict: Recommended for the premise, dark humour and genuine playable-menace fantasy. Just don't mistake an excellent joke for a deep game.
Truck-kun has discovered that vehicular homicide can be funny, useful and narratively heroic.
Insurance companies will be thrilled.
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