Truck-kun Is Supporting Me From Another World - Bonkers, but Boring

Welcome back my weebs and otakus, it's Otakunofuji with another game video! Today we're looking at Truck-kun is Supporting Me From Another World, a silly arcade-y game featuring anime's #1 serial killer where you do what truck-kun does best and run over as many people on the street as you can. Don't worry, they get isekai'd so it's all fine? Unfortunately, the bonkers premise is kind of the only thing the game really has going for it. Everything else is just OK and the gameplay is pretty disappointingly bland. 

To start, a brief overview of truck-kun. The truck-kun meme is that a random truck (or other vehicle) runs over an anime character - usually in the first episode - that changes their life. Examples include Excel Saga, Yu Yu Hakusho, Zombie Land Saga, and Konosuba among many others. 

The story in this game, Truck-kun is Supporting Me From Another World, is that a delivery driver accidentally hits a woman and kills her. The woman gets isekai'd - which means reborn in another world, in case you haven't watched anime in the last 15-years - and can, somehow, communicate with the truck driver across dimensions. She's now the mythical hero of that fantasy world and needs enemies to fight to get stronger. It just so happens that any other people truck-kun runs over are reborn in the other world as monsters, so you get where this is going. Once the hero gets strong enough to defeat the big bad skeleton king in the other world she, and everyone else that got isekai'd, will be brought back to our world like nothing happened. Along the way, the woman and the driver get to know each other and blah blah blah. Whatever. 

Sadly, the game ain't funny. Or especially interesting. You'd expect it to be kind of silly based on the premise, but it never plays up the absurdity of what you're doing at all. And, in fact, it's just kind of sad and depressing as you learn more about the woman's horrible life as a corporate slave before she got smacked by a truck. The driver is just a bland blank slate of nothingness.

The gameplay loop is at least a little enjoyable, once you figure out how it works. The game world is a small-ish city full of pedestrians to run over and objects to smash into. You have a shockingly brief 90-second time limit, but can add more time by collecting icons spread around the world or by completing objectives. Objectives include drifting a certain distance, running over a number of people, hitting a number of objects, jumping set distances, making deliveries, and more. You can extend the time of each run to up to 10-minutes with careful play. While you're doing all of that, the hero is fighting monsters in a little window at the bottom of the screen. As you complete objectives and reach milestones, the story progresses until you have to fight the skeleton king.

Except it's all really, really repetitive and boring. The gameplay is incredibly shallow and the novelty of the premise wears off after your first run. Really, the novelty of running over pedestrians wore off 25-years ago about five-minutes into playing Grand Theft Auto 3 the first time. I bought this game because it seemed so over the top and silly and funny and fun, but the game never really goes anywhere. It can't be overstated how one-note the whole experience is. 

So, as you can tell, I'm pretty underwhelmed with Truck-kun is Supporting Me From Another World. It isn't at all bad and I definitely don't hate it or anything, but it is really bland and boring. At least it's relatively cheap. For just $20 you can spend a few hours running over pedestrians and getting some fairly easy achievements. Keep your expectations low and it can be OK.