Should have been great
I really wanted to like this game. I think the concept is great, and the television commercials (similar to the preview mode when the game loads) looked like the game would be a lot of fun. Too bad then that Big Mutha Truckers 2 suffers from horrible design. It turns what could have easily been a five-star experience into a two-star dud. It's almost difficult to push yourself to bother finishing the game. I did complete it, but it ended up feeling more like working a factory job than playing a game.
The primary flaws are the lack of interaction and the fact that the entire game world is open from the moment you begin--and it's not that large of an environment. You play as one member of a truck driving family--you pick a character out of four possible choices, and you're stuck with that character for the entire game. Not that it makes much of a difference. The game is oddly in first person mode, so that most of the time you never see your character. The heart of the game is that you have to drive truckloads of random goods to various locations. Over and over and over. The same small set of locations. When you get there you sell your random stuff and buy different random stuff. The number of locations is very small, as is the list of random stuff, and the driving time between them is short. Imagine a list of goods consisting of beans, CDs, widgets and draperies, and a list of towns consisting of Boston, New York, Washington D.C. and Philadelphia. Imagine also that it only takes a couple minutes to drive from town to town. Most of this game, then, is driving beans to New York, draperies to Boston, draperies to New York, beans to Washington D.C., and so on. The difference is that you're driving to fictional towns and the goods are even more random. The ultimate goal is to earn enough to pay off jurors for a trial. At first, you'll only make a few thousand per run, and you need to earn millions to complete the game. So you're going to be driving the same routes, with the same random stuff, over and over and over. Sound like fun?
Of course, you're driving an 18-wheeler, which should be fun. However, even though you can change rigs and cabs, the physics of the game are paltry enough that it doesn't really matter what you're driving or what you're hauling. They all pretty much handle the same.
To make the game a bit more challenging, you can be attacked by bikers, cops, and UFOs. Unfortunately, these are all extremely predictable and easy to shake off, making it not very fun and not very much of a challenge. You can also pick up hobos and give them a ride, and you can destroy some other cars and buildings and such to get a bonus. However, you make the most money by delivering your stuff to the next town as fast as possible, so it discourages interacting with stuff on the road. It should have been possible to earn just as much money by interacting and taking your time--that would have been a lot more fun. On the other hand, when it comes down to it, there's just not that much to interact with, and no matter what, your character may as well be non-existent.
Even worse is the interaction when you're out of your cab. When you arrive at a town you get a quick shot of your character, always in the same position, standing by the cab. You can't walk around any towns. You can't interact with anyone or anything. You just get a menu where you can choose "Store, Bar, Leave (drive to another town), Quit (the game)". You have to go to the stores to sell stuff. But you're just plopped there in a first person mode, talking to the clerks, who generally repeat the same dialogue. The same thing happens in the bars.
In the bars, you can play random card games to earn a few dollars gambling. The card games are as "impressive" as Solitaire on Windows 3.1. And the money you can earn with them will not make a difference. The bars also offer the mini-games, which are the only things providing some variety. These are also too short, and there just aren't enough of them.
Making the game less challenging is the fact that a menu tells you what you should buy and where you should deliver it, and the game tells you where the next juror will be, tells you when you should pay them, etc.
Aside from the lack of variety, interaction and real thought/challenge, which is a major problem, the main flaw with this game is the randomness of goods, locations and other characters. The redneck theme should be a lot of fun. There is little limit to what could be done with it to make an intricate, funny and challenging game with lots of interaction opportunities. We need to be able to walk around towns and interact with people and objects. The game needs to make sense and not be random. The theme needs to be consistent. There's no reason to have characters and locations like a Russian Mafioso on a yacht or a Vegan nudist in a ski resort, etc. This is supposed to be a game about rednecks/hillbillies! And why are they hauling/selling stuff like bottled water and perfume? Create a redneck world, populated with rednecks, doing redneck things, interacting with redneck items. The game as it stands is just too random, repetitive/boring, featureless and unfunny. Even the dialogue and soundtrack were random and unfunny. The GTA-like radio stations while driving were also random, unfunny and mostly annoying.
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