Recent reviews by Lacene

Less than an hour into one of the new maps and once again we have convoy routes using AI trucks that have completely open differentials (despite the fact that the real world truck they are based on literally has a lockable diff as factory standard!) making them completely incapable of driving over anything but the smoothest of tarmac with their underpowered engines.
It gets better though, as now you can't build the roads they need because at that point in the game there are no quarries around to refill sand for you to fix the issue.

Is it impossible to resolve? No.
Is it actually fun though? Also no.

These trucks are... okay though probably not worth the price if you are only interested in actual performance.

The Avernhorn is the star of the show here, it's an 8x8 superheavy but has quite a short and narrow frame making it a lot more compact and agile, relatively speaking, but still stable thanks to it's wide rear tires. It also has an excellent power to weight ratio meaning unlike several other more modern superheavies it is a good climber. It has an extremely forgiving collision model too, it's chin is practically non-existent (unlike the mastodon) and can more or less drive over tree stumps without a care in the world.
It has all the usual 2 slot addons you'd expect save for medium logs and notably it cannot have a loading crane and a truck bed. It also lacks a roof rack and instead it's extra supplies come from it's bumper and a large utility module fitted behind the cab. Because of this most people will probably use it as a high saddle truck. It's saddle height while not the best is still good and it does have great pulling power.
It does still has decent range even without the utility mount as it has 400L of fuel +160 in the bumper (+300L , +300 repair + 2 wheels in the utility module) and is quite efficient when in high gear. It's default tires are decent and it can handle harsh terrain... but not in high gear which is where the problems show. Any time you have to place it into low and enable difflock it becomes extremely thirsty extremely fast with it's fuel consumption almost tripling. It's high gear is also quite slow compared to other trucks of it's class.

This makes it difficult to really see a niche where it shines, in conditions where you can cruise in high gear it's great but those typically aren't the conditions you're going to being out a superheavy truck for. If you want a more compact superheavy with high utility the PLAD can handle a 2 slot bed, crane and hitch and while not having nearly as much range is still decent. If you want to walk through every kind of terrain imaginable without a care and don't mind bumping your chin constantly you have the mastodon.

The Padera is... meh
First of all this truck is quite tippy, not to the point where it is unusable but you will have to be a lot more careful with it than other trucks of it's class.
Performance is decently good, nothing to write home about but it is a capable truck and comes with it's own mud tires by default which are effective, like the Avenhorn it is much more efficient in high gear, like the Avenhorn this high gear is actually kinda slow. The truck's fuel tank only has 250L with another 120L on the roof meaning when you do kick it into low and it gets thirsty you feel it a lot more.
It's addons are pretty good, though it's unique ramped ramped sideboard bed is functionally next to useless. The truck really needs active suspension if it wants to use this as by default the ramps won't even touch the floor by quite a wide margin and the ramps are also steep with the sideboards making it too narrow to fit anything but the smallest scouts. It's far from all purpose either because despite looking like you could use it to carry cargo you in fact cannot. So you may as well use either the standard flatbed or articulated towing platform that it also has.
I wouldn't mind but there are modded trucks that fulfil the idea and role of an all purpose flatbed far better than this, being able to move and lower the flatbed to allow easier loading as well as being able to have cargo sill packed on them, this feels lazy and half baked in comparison.
On the plus side it can fit a standard flatbed and crane, and in fact you have options between the kong style crane from the bandit behind the cab or the usual small loading crane mounted on the bumper, making it effective if you want to use a flatbed and hitched trailer.
It also has both saddles but it's not great for them as the truck's rear fenders will clip into saddle trailers quite a lot.
It is fast and efficient, but again only in fairly light conditions where basically any truck is good and becomes much more troublesome f you have to push it.

The patch making the dam and the bay areas actually have an unlockable connection has helped with making the map less insanely bloated however this still isn't a great DLC.

Rather than cargo pickups being in relatively easy and central locations and delivery points being in more difficult areas this is inverted in the DLC. Steel bars and rolls which you'll need vast amounts of for example need you to cross a river twice every time you need them. This isn't a risky shortcut this, prior to the patch, was the ONLY way to get there. These crossings were not difficult, but are slow and tedious even when abusing overstacking in one of the various supertrucks we have, a playstyle I'm assuming Sabre don't want to actually encourage. Almost every single task in this DLC will take between 6 to 8 slots of cargo as well making already long trips twice as long if you don't cheese the game.

Wooden logs are another pain, we're back to season 1 levels of excess and the logging area is cordoned off behind two hills that have heavy camber and a deep swamp section with again no slower and safer alternative routes once again enforcing the use of overpowered trucks for your sanity. You will need so many logs, both to deliver or to craft into planks (and yes the crafting section is also behind a very tippy stretch of road).

Several tasks also feel very pointlessly extended such as the mission to unlock this season's superheavy which involves dragging it all the way across the zone to repair and refuel it before dragging it all the way back for no reason other than to annoy you. They also make the dropoff point difficult to actually park the truck in once you get there because you are winching the truck and can't exactly back it up with precision.

The map does have a relatively well developed road network, one that does allow you to repair... most of it. We still have several parts that are bafflingly unfixable, the worst being in the bay area where you have a collapsed section of highway forcing you to take a detour through a literal swamp despite having a contract to repair an even larger section of bridge less than 200 yards away. Like, I get it Sabre, this is an offroading game, but there's plenty of areas already off the beaten path, it would be nice to earn the right to shelve the superheavies at least sometimes, and it just leaves the map feeling like it can't ever be truly completed because there's these broken bridges and landslides we're just not allowed to touch. The road network is also more or less a necessity given you have to cross three zones to do half of the deliveries in this game.

As for the three trucks, they're alright.
The Billet is my favourite of the three, it's a heavy scout hybrid similar to the Warthog of being able to pull heavy trailers and having an automatous winch but a bit more stable and gutsy with a large van body addon that pleasantly still allows it to hitch trailers with it equipped. This makes it pretty flexible as a scout that can also do a little hauling without needing to go back to the garage to re-equip and it isn't obscenely top heavy like the other heavy scouts even with its van body. It can also pull low saddles if you want but it is only a 4x4.

The Buddy is your typical 6x6 truck, it's very fast and fuel efficient consuming less than some scouts when on roads or light terrain but struggles and gets exceptionally thirsty any time you face deep mud or try to pull something seriously heavy.

The Chimera is... there and not worth the huge effort it's mission demands. We are still paying for the sins of the Kenworth's massive overstacking potential meaning that big loading crane can only be used with the 2 slot sideboard leaving a huge empty space on the truck as it's unique flatbed always comes with spare wheels that you won't ever need. While it is more compact and "agile" than the season 15 Elephant it is still unfortunately just as thirsty and gutless as that truck is. The fact you can use a sideboard rather than drag around a heavy high saddle trailer does make it a little less inept. Of course Sabre releasing another DLC superheavy that can do everything the chimera can but better also doesn't help either. It is a superheavy, but we have so many now that are just better. The Kenworth can overstack more, the Plad is more stable, the Avenhorn can pull harder and is less thirsty.

It's rare for a game to be the perfect sequel. So often a sequel can get plenty of things right but still end up fumbling something along the way where the previous game did it better.

Monster train 2 is one of those rare games. It perfectly expands upon what was already good while also adding plenty of new things that don't feel out of place.

I changed my mind, the final map in this game is so incredibly broken in so many different places that I cannot recommend this with any level of confidence.

The TL;DR Season 15 is a difficult map but feels much fairer and more reasonable with it's difficulty compared to Year 1's maps of Kola and Amur. It's a bit easier but that's not really a fault of the map more that we have had 3 years of power creep and game experience. It also has fewer of the usual bad habits other maps have, though still present. The new trucks however feel very underwhelming.

Lets be honest, this map could never be as difficult as Kola and Amur. Those maps threw us into truly extreme conditions and we had barely any tools to deal with them. But more than that Amur in particular was, frankly, trollish in it's execution. The difficulty of that map was heavily front loaded with Urska river having in my opinion some of the worst map design in the game. It's garage was placed in the least useful place possible necessitating you driving on ice anytime you wanted to start from the garage and the less said about that damned tree the better. Once you unlocked the cosmodrone garage and the Ziks the difficulty flatlined.
What really set the Amur map apart was how fantastic it's capstone contract was, building a rocket, slowly dragging it out with multiple trucks and then seeing it launch with all of the fanfare it deserved.
Really the only way to top that would be launching ourselves into space and using a scifi truck to haul cargo on the moon. Modders, please get on that.

Anyway, Quebec, It is in general a lot less annoying of a map. It does only have two zones but then how often did you visit Northen Aegis in Amur? Most big obstacles are in fact fixable so no perma toppled trees and the one mandatory unfixable bridge every map must have does at least look like too big of a job for us to handle. I still have problems with it however.

The Harbor zone's main thing is the extremely long and winding paths you have to take that allow no real deviation from them. There is this long road network with several bridges you have to build (one of them twice!) but this road isn't that useful. This is because the east of the map where the harbor map crossing is as well as the town is never actually served by this road connection at all. While on the map screen it may look like there are paths or hills to allow you to the interior of the map you cannot actually reach it from there as you'll always face sheer rock cliffs that you cannot scale. You do have to either take the ice path down south, or take the northen path...which also demands you cross a frozen lake. It's asinine, the longer route should be safer and easier to compensate allowing you to use larger trailers for easier bulk transit but as it stands the highway that you rebuild doesn't actually feel that useful outside of accessing the factory or sawmill. Technically once you have the roads fully built you could go from the garage, to the map crossing near the factory, all through the lake map and then cross back at the harbor there but that is a bit silly. It also STILL has a broken road section needing you to wade through snow. If I'm taking a detour that bloody long I should be able to run a highway truck through it!
I don't dislike ice crossings but I do dislike them being near mandatory as it effectively locks you out of using the medium weight trucks that are too heavy to travel over the ice but not heavy enough to plough through it, a problem when there's already less and less reason to use them over the various overpowered giga trucks we have in the first place. Just having a couple of routes to access the interior of the map from the repairable bridge near the garage or getting up onto the mountain trail from the landslide near the oil refinery would make the map feel much less tedious than asking the player to travel around 50% of the map's exterior in order to get anywhere because a huge number of contracts will center around the port or town.
There are also three contracts that just require you to carry 8 units of cargo somewhere, 2 of them being along 95% the same route. It's lazy and I have enough hours in this game that I really don't need the padding.
There are also pontoon crossings now. They're neat. They have a 25% chance of just eating your trucks and it getting clipped into the pontoon needing a recovery. But they're neat.

Lake Ribiere is significantly better a map in my opinion albeit with fewer contracts, it's a shame it doesn't have have a garage of it's own but the map is a lot more open, and it's road network when fully repaired is actually useful and does serve most of the parts of the map that you would want to access frequently while being a lot longer a path than taking the more difficult interior trails. Not the logging camp and again the game teases you with the main trails getting very close but having no way to actually cross over without a huge detour but it is better; And this map doesn't have that much logging. Well it does, but you haul logs to get wood planks crafted for other contracts, and this helps space out the deliveries rather than asking me to haul 10 loads at once making it a lot more bearable. There is still a unfixable section of the road near the quarry, and the devs have also tried to pile up obstacles there to prevent players from using trailer bridges too which just feels petty. It also didn't work, suck it Saber.

As for the new trucks they are underwhelming.
The Elephant is basically a sidegrade of the Kolob 74941, a large heavy tractor that can only use a high saddle. It's main selling point is the loading crane stolen from the bandit and colossal roof rack. The problem is it feels utterly toothless. It's engine feels far too weak for the truck itself that in any sort of harsh terrain like broken ice or steep hills, which are common in Quebec, it just stalls out and it's wheels lock up even when you aren't pulling that much. It also is very light on the nose and so understeer or just no steering at all is very common making it an unwieldy beast. The roof rack isn't even that much of a bonus as the truck is so thirsty it needs that just to have any range. The crane is nice, it's pretty much the strongest loading crane in the game, but it's mainly there so you can re-hitch trailers in the wild since it is a tall truck.I tried to make use of it with the heavy lowboy trailer for general cargo carrying but the PLAD and Kenworth 963 are just way more useful and capable without as much hassle.
The Mercer is... okay. It's a perfectly serviceable medium truck but it both has a somewhat small fuel tank and not that much power under the hood. It's unique gearbox does make it consume a lot less fuel in AWD however with only one low gear and a tendacy to wheel lock if not in low gears makes it a bit of a pain to use. The problem is Quebec's conditions make it a terrible pick, even with the extensive road network fully repaired you are still going to have to venture over ice or deep snow frequently and it's not really well equipped to deal with either.
This is in essence my issue with "hard" maps, because of the conditions I'm just ending up using the same 3 or 4 trucks constantly because if I try to use anything else, like the trucks unlocked in the very map itself, I'm just going to get stuck and then have to use old faithfuls to rescue them anyway.

Could be better if the devs actually concentrated on the main game rather than shoving god awful minigames in my face every 5 minutes.
No I don't want to play bootleg magic, bootleg starfox, bootleg road rash, bootleg punchout or bootleg mario kart.
I'm probably missing a dozen more minigames from the list.

This is a game from a different time, it plays like something from the PS2, looks like something from the PS3 and has none of the anti consumer baggage of other modern games. It is sad that this alone is worth praising but such is the state of the industry and the racing genre in particular.

This game is very particular on what it offers, unstructured highway racing with traffic that is heavy enough for you to remain aware of it but never enough to actually pose much of a hazard at all. With nothing but long straights and gentle suggestions of curves the game shouldn't be that interesting to drive, especially with it's fairly simplistic handling. Yet the framing of hunting down new rivals and the fact few races last longer than a minute really stops you from dwelling on that fact long enough to notice.

Act one's progression is pretty rough, being overly restrictive in what you can start with and the money to earn a new vehicle takes a bit too long for my taste. One thing to note is the game generally wants you to not return to the garage that often if you can help it. Between long drive bonuses and the win multiplier it is optimal to not go back until the game forces you, or you reach the credit limit and instead use parking areas to refresh your tires and nitrous.

The AI also leaves something to be desired, it's kinda stupid and prone to ramming you into walls quite often as well as car balance being all over the place. Most races will end as a one sided stomp as well as the car the opponent has rarely actually matching to it's performance. But when you do have an opponent who can keep up or is slightly faster than you it does become surprisingly tense and fun despite the reality of you just going in a straight line and barely steering for a minute.

It's fun, rough in a way that is just down to it's fundamental design rather than being EA but still enjoyable. If you actually manage to get invested there's a lot of hours for how comparatively light the content is.

I finally managed to get past my soft locking woes and managed to play through the DLC. My views on Frontline 59 are mixed. This DLC is basically a more condensed form of the main game with all the good and bad parts of that game pushed into extremes.

The difficulty is extreme, hard mode in Wingman was already a lot more difficult than ace difficulty in AC7. Lack of any health regen and no checkpoints will do that.
Yet at the same time the difficulty always felt a lot fairer too, in Wingman you fail a mission because you yourself got shot down. In AC7 you usually failed a mission because of a timer or an NPC getting shot down instead which is a lot more aggravating.
Mercenary mode is even more insane of course, but that needs a full game clear to even unlock, it's fine if that mode is simply unfair.

Wingman also, in general, had a lot fewer crazy set-pieces that actually affected gameplay. Sure being transported to the Fanta-dimension was dramatic but outside of a glitchy hud missions still played more or less the same.

F-59 however has been copying AC's homework a little more closely with a couple of these missions and the result is very much showing why AC now has checkpoints and health regen.
Don't get me wrong, the premise of mission 4 and 6 of the DLC are genuinely fantastic, and the final boss of the DLC is a much better fight mechanically than anything 7 or it's own DLC could offer. I don't want them to change anything about the missions themselves; If there is a sequel, I do hope that they continue the trends they started in the DLC and double down on the lunacy.

But at the same time with the more extreme scenarios the game is much more in need of checkpoints, resupply lines or something in order to maintain the higher action and more dramatic scenarios without it turning into a frustrating slog. Best compromise I can think of would be to keep the current no checkpoint/resupply to Mercenary mode or make it a modifier.

During the tutorial section I was fined twice for traffic collisions before the game had even granted me control of the truck. That is the level of polish you're going to have to expect here.

The game has promise but they've leaned too hard into "iTs A tRuCk In SpAcE gUyS!!1!" angle and made it a pain in the ass to control in a 6 DoF environment. You can only control the pitch of the vehicle and you cannot strafe at all, this is combined with most turning causing your truck to pitch up or down alongside rolling and a stabiliser system that is little more than a mild suggestion. Turning it off and on felt no different, it's that useless. While going point to point this is not much of an issue, aside from feeling like you are staring through a letterbox because our character is apparently 4 foot tall and can barely see over the hood.

The issues begin whenever you have to do any sort of precision control such as hitching up, almost always these will be slightly off the main horizon of the system (or you'll be lower than expected since you need to keep the nose down to even see where you are going). Lining up for these when you can only pivot around your center and not strafe at all means you need ridiculous amounts of space to line everything up since if your truck is not completely perpendicular to what you want to dock with there's a good chance the docking system will just refuse to let you hitch. In the demo the game would twist you into position so long as you were somewhat close but for release they have made this much stricter.

I get that it's supposed to feel like a big rig in space, but being able to do some minor course correction without needing a 45 point turn isn't going to ruin that, the truck is still going to feel heavy and have a ton of inertia. It is after all a STAR truck, not some clapped out Kenworth.

Also the maintenance aspect, I like it. Batteries running out frequently or the truck in general being an unreliable heap that is always breaking does add some nice distractions from just flying down the spaceways (at half the speed limit because you are always stuck behind some slow AI that jackknifes the his truck every 20 yards). But the default prices for your batteries and other consumables is utterly insane. Why the hell are air filters costing over twice my job payout when they barely last? There are settings to adjust these things to be fair but to change them you have to start an entire new save which is pure insanity.

TL;Dr it's undercooked