Big Mutha Truckers - Yee-Haw!

30/09/25

When I pick out my next game, sometimes I’m looking for a genre, sometimes I’m looking for something unique. Sometimes I’m looking for something famous, or something completely obscure. Sometimes, a name is all I need, and there are few games on the Game Boy Advance with a name as fantastic as Big Mutha Truckers. And, for once, that funny ‘lil name isn’t the only reason to appreciate it!

Big Mutha Truckers, despite a lot of structural and foundational issues, does have potential. Rather than being what I expected - some unholy cross between Crazy Taxi and Euro Truck Simulator, Big Mutha’ Truckers is a bonafide, albeit basic, economic sim-esque game, a race for profit in a fairly advanced looking world, at least for the Game Boy Advance. Unfortunately, for every interesting element to the game, something exists in tandem to hold it back - it’s foundation is solid, but it’s too repetitive for it’s own good. It sports some fairly advanced tech for the system, but it comes at the cost of performance and fidelity. And whilst it boasts a fairly extended playtime, especially amongst the more obscure titles of the GBA, this basic content grows too repetitive and boring to hold your attention for it’s potential ten hour playtime.

Trial By Economics

Big Mutha Truckers has two major modes to engage in - Trial By Truckin’, and Mission Mode, with a lot of elements of the latter popping up in the former. Trial By Truckin’, surprisingly enough, is as much a driving/trucking game as it is a basic economics game. Playing as one of four children, your mother is preparing to pass on ownership of the titular trucking business. Across sixty days, you need to earn enough money, via transporting various supplies, completing challenges and fulfilling jobs, to outbid your siblings and gain control of Big Mutha Truckers. Surprisingly enough, Big Mutha Truckers for the GBA seems like a fairly loyal and accurate demake of its older, home console siblings, albeit with obvious limitations. But the overall format of competing with your siblings in the battle for profits remains uniform across the various versions of the game, leading the GBA version to feel more akin to a ‘demake’ than a port.

The primary task and the thing you’ll be spending the majority of your time is trucking over to one of the five locales spread out in the game’s pseudo-open world, buying certain supplies (which, seemingly randomly, will be going up and down in price per unit) and delivering it to another locale to hopefully obtain a tidy profit. Usually, you can pop into the bar that’s present at each locale and get a tip on what specific product is experiencing particular demand at a certain location. This tip, as far as I can tell, was the only real guide point as to what I should be buying, and where I should be taking it. Sure, I can play around with some guesswork, buy some things noted as being lower in price and hoping it’s expensive to sell somewhere else, but I preferred to just go with the sure thing, and as far as I can tell, following the loop of bar tip -> profit generally seemed to pay dividends.

Whilst I genuinely like the unique twist on the game being based around its, admittedly very basic, economic elements, the game’s structure and simplicity undermines anything interesting the game has going on. First of all, 90% of your time in this game will be spent just driving from one locale to another. Whilst frequently one of your siblings will challenge you to a race to the locale for a bonus payout, they perpetually feel like almost nothing to engage with. Every race, I either destroyed them without breaking a sweat, or they somehow got so far ahead of me despite me driving perfectly.

So, race or not, you’re just going to be driving from point A to point B for the vast majority of the game. And as long as you remember to fuel up, you won’t have any real issues along the way. There’s very little you can get your truck stuck on - impressive, considering how badly I can perform in any game involving a truck, and any major threats coming from a lack of skilled writing can very quickly be written off. If you strike them during your deliveries, you can be assaulted by police or bikers, but police will only give you a tiny fine if you get caught, and bikers are so unthreatening I never even got caught by them.

The Long Road of Shallow Imprecision

There’s just zero depth to any of the game, and no matter how unique or charming parts of the game can be, it very, very quickly loses its luster. It also isn’t help that this game is LONG. Not insanely, but the game takes place across sixty in-game ‘days’, with each day being one delivery. With the time taken to buy your goods, drive them to the next locale and sell everything, not counting races or side missions you might run into, each day probably takes 8-10 minutes, leading to a run of the mode reaching ten hours. There’s simply not enough variety of interesting content to support that kind of run-time, even if it’s refreshing to see a cheap-ish game on the GBA having legs.

It doesn’t help that so, so much of this game is just… you’ll just be driving, plain and simple. Whilst Big Mutha’ Truckers spouts a surprisingly large world, it’s a fairly benign world. Flat, unappealing roads, a handful of dirt tracks, and locations that exist as set dressing, and nothing more. Sure, it’s nice to drive through the snow, or a nightscape city, but there’s no functional difference to driving in either environment. Competition is a beach, so rather than following the rules of the road, the trucks you drive will be going all over the place, sending cars flying and destruction - apparently - in your wake.

It’s very rare that you feel super in control of your truck,so the jank feels kind of built into the arcadey-style of driving. But that arcadey vibe feels at odds with how the world is set up - if you’d be driving around and across countryside, mountains and had a focus on shortcuts and whatnot, I think it’d be a lot more palatable, but it’s consistently just driving down paved roads with very little off-road action to speak of. I said that you’re constantly all over the place, smashing up everything in your path, but it all feels like flavouring that adds very little to the game, since your truck is so armored it’s never in danger of being actually damaged.

Maybe it’s an element in the console version of the game, but I think I’d prefer if the game’s sixty day format was more timer based then ‘one delivery = one day’, since I think that’d encourage you into a more chaotic style of driving, and just make the game’s pace feel that little bit less glacial. Upgrades are available for your truck, but beyond upgrading the storage and max speed of your truck, the majority feel very much like flavouring due to how chaotic and tank-like your truck drives at a baseline, so you’re better off saving as much money as you can for the core goal of the mode.

The game’s only real notable side mode is Mission Mode, which instead of throwing you into the open environment, will just give you specific, time-limited tasks or minigames to complete. For example, the first mission will have you driving through the locales and smashing up newspaper dispensers - must be an election coming up! Some of them are just flat out basic minigames - a tug-of-war between two trucks (because that’s something people just… do, I guess?) was hitting the A button with enough tempo to keep it in a certain region of the gauge to win. Overall, these missions are generally fine and inoffensive, giving the driving gameplay a little more sauce, but I’d be remiss to call them interesting or anything approaching that. Sure, it’s the only time that the parking micro-game really feels like it matters, but it’s really scraping the barrel of what I’d call ‘notable’.

Additionally, a bunch of these actually come up during the main game - sometimes, you’ll pop into the bar, and instead of getting a tip on what’s selling well where, you’ll be offered a job that’s just one of the Mission Mode tasks. As far as I could tell, you actually will play the missions in the same order as they’re listed in Mission Mode itself, and seemed to be doled out at relatively even days. Whilst I didn’t end up finishing the main mode of the game, it wouldn’t surprise me if you end up playing the vast majority of the Mission Mode jobs. Even though it’s just a repeat of Mission Mode, they do help to break up the endless driving loop that makes up much of this game, and if one was only interested in playing the main economic mode, at least you can engage with everything Mission Mode has to offer anyway.

Truly Incredible Horrors

Perhaps most notably, Big Mutha Truckers employs a basic 3D engine to drive around the world, giving everything a lot more depth and making the world feel a lot bigger than sprite-based titles, more frequently utilized in kart racers and the like, usually do. But the issue is that the ambition present in this more complex graphical fidelity rears its head in the fairly atrocious FPS the game is peddling, which frequently feels as if it drops into the single digits when a lot of vehicles or moving graphics pop up. This especially impacts the already loose and imprecise driving due to lost frames making everything feel that little bit more unresponsive and awkward. The game already doesn’t feel great, so every little annoyance makes it a lot harder to appreciate what’s good in the game.

Also, I went over that the game doesn’t look that great whilst you’re out and truckin’, but that’s really not an excuse for how genuinely hideous the characters are in this game. Seriously, anytime you visit the various locations whilst doing all your deliveries, you’ll be greeted by a cavalcade of what can only be described as a cavalcade of caricatured nightmare beasts. Seriously, there are NPCs that feel like stereotypes of people I didn’t even know about. The music is barely anything to speak of, either - not awful, but it’s a lot of what I can only describe as incredibly low-bitrate ‘redneck chase music’ that just sort of wears away at you as the game moves on.

I don’t hate Big Mutha Truckers; much like a title I played somewhat recently, Sea Trader, there is an interesting, foundational format to the game that genuinely surprised me - it would’ve been so easy to just make Mission Mode the entire game, but instead, we get an entire longform, albeit basic, economic delivery game. But pretty much everything undermines this sense of interest; driving rapidly becomes boring due to long stretches of… nothing happening, with any major threats to your business being anything but. The poor performance belies a surprisingly advanced looking game that just was never going to work with the power and budget the developers were likely working with. It’s certainly not an awful game; it’s uniqueness and swings it takes are worth a look, but it’s simply just got no staying power - after just a few hours immersed in it’s unique brand of madness, I just don’t feel any urge to continue my fight to inherit the business of Big Mutha Truckers.

Thank you so much for reading my review of Big Mutha Truckers! Not a whole lot of updates from me, just excitement from the slow march towards game 100! As always, you can find me around the internet under GameBoyAbyss, or email me at mgeorge7003@hotmail.com or cckaiju@gmail.com. Thanks again for reading, and I’ll see you next time!