Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?! Review

Isekai has basically taken over anime at this point, to the degree that the genre's biggest tropes have turned into memes on their own. Truck-kun, the infamous vehicle that flattens some unsuspecting protagonist and kicks off their new life in a fantasy world, is one of the most recognizable of those tropes, popular enough that it even got its own spin-off anime.

Strange Scaffold, a studio known for chasing odd, specific concepts and turning them into full games, decided to lean into the joke directly. Working with publisher Frosty Pop, the studio built Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?!, a driving game that literalizes the meme by putting you in the driver's seat of the truck itself.

It borrows its chaotic energy from Crazy Taxi.

The title arrives at a moment when Sega's own upcoming entry in that series has been leaning on generative AI, which makes this scrappier, human-made alternative land even better by comparison. The setup follows Carissa Ward, a career woman who just landed a long-awaited promotion to VP of Marketing. She barely gets to enjoy it.

On her way home from the office, she steps into the street and gets run down by a truck. Instead of just dying, she wakes up reincarnated in a fantasy realm as a buff elf warrior, and she is not thrilled about the timing. Using her deep knowledge of anime and RPGs, she quickly figures out the rules of her new world and realizes there's a way back.

The realm's final boss, the Skeleton King, is holding onto an item known as the Scroll of Resurrection (referred to elsewhere as a portal of resurrection), which could send her back to her old body if she can defeat him. The catch is that her new world is oddly short on monsters for her to fight and level up against. So she uses magic to contact the driver who killed her and strikes a deal.

He keeps running people over in the real world, and every person he hits gets reincarnated as a monster she can farm for experience back in her world. It's a deeply silly premise, and Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?! never once treats it as anything other than a joke, which keeps the whole thing feeling breezy instead of grim, despite the fact that you are, technically, murdering hundreds of pedestrians.

The writing leans hard into that absurdity and rarely blinks.

There's a massive, unexplained figure looming over the city skyline that nobody ever comments on, and the driver spends a good chunk of the early hours voicing genuine guilt over mowing down bystanders, only for Carissa to wave it off and insist everyone can sort out the morality of it all later. Somehow it works, mostly because Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?! never lets its jokes slow down the actual pace of a run.

Once the opening cutscenes wrap up, you're dropped into the town of Wenvale, the only map in the game, and the loop kicks off. Every outing gives you a short window, starting around 90 seconds, to rack up as much chaos as you can.

A running list of objectives sits in the corner of the screen, and clearing them adds time to your clock, hands out stars, or does both at once. Some objectives are as simple as driving in reverse for a few seconds or leaning on the horn a handful of times. Others ask for more effort, like smashing a set number of fences, plowing through market stalls, taking down a billboard, or tracking down a specific class of object scattered around town.

There are also delivery objectives that feel the most like classic Crazy Taxi, complete with glowing circles you park in until a progress bar fills, followed by a big arrow pointing you toward the drop-off. Potions are scattered around Wenvale in fixed spots too, and picking those up adds extra seconds to your timer, so learning the map well enough to route between them becomes its own mini skill.

Route memorization only gets you so far without a solid handle on the controls themselves.

Since the potion locations never move, regular players of Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?! can eventually memorize a full loop through town that stacks up a huge amount of bonus time before a run even really gets going, which turns route knowledge into almost as valuable a skill as your actual driving.

Driving itself uses a fairly familiar control scheme: one trigger for gas, the other for braking and reversing, a face button for boosting, another for drifting, and the horn mapped to its own button for triggering Carissa's special attack. Holding the drift button through a turn and releasing it grants a speed boost, not unlike the drift-boost system from Mario Kart, and it becomes second nature once you get a feel for how the truck handles corners.

There's also a quick sideswipe move triggered by double-tapping a shoulder button, useful for smashing tougher objects and knocking cop cars out of your way, plus a button that instantly flips your direction so you can escape a bad situation without doing a slow three-point turn.

On a small screen at the bottom of your view is the other half of the loop: Carissa is battling the monsters you are sending her way. Each pedestrian you collide with becomes an enemy on her side (up to 4 at a time), and each non-human object you smash into is a separate meter that is linked to her weapon.

Carissa's fight isn't the only thing escalating as your run goes on.

After that gauge is filled, honking your horn unleashes her big attack, which will wipe out the line of enemies in front of her and give you a nice trickle of bonus stars (about 1 star per 5 enemies). It's a neat way to connect the driving and RPG aspects, as you actually have to divide your attention between driving and looking down to make sure Carissa's queue isn't idle.

The only issue is that the ratio of pedestrians to destructibles isn't always equal, and sometimes you're wishing for an additional pedestrian to kill or a garbage can to fill the gauge, not the other way around. Completing enough objectives fills up a separate heat meter, shown as a row of flame icons, and once that fills, the police start showing up to hunt you down.

They spawn from random directions with no warning, which adds a nice jolt of unpredictability, but it can also work against you, since a cop car appearing out of nowhere right as you're lining up a jump or trying to hit a specific target can wreck the attempt entirely. The cop cars are armored too, so you generally need a solid boost, a drift into them, or a sideswipe to send them flying off and buy yourself some breathing room.

In the earlier part of a run, this rarely feels overwhelming, but the more heat you rack up, the more frequently squad cars pour in from every direction, and it isn't unusual for them to end up boxing your truck in entirely, stopping you dead just as you're trying to line up a jump or a delivery. It's one of the few places where Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?! trades its usual controlled chaos for something closer to genuine bad luck.

Star collection feeds directly into progression.

Hit enough milestones, and you'll unlock short story scenes between the driver and Carissa, which slowly move the plot toward a final confrontation and give the whole experience a proper ending instead of just being an endless arcade loop. Early on, these milestones line up naturally with how you'd already be playing, since things like landing hits, boosting, or drifting happen constantly anyway.

Later stretches get rougher, though, with some milestones demanding thousands of meters of pure boosting or drifting with nothing else attached, which can feel like padding tacked onto an otherwise tight runtime. A few of the milestone challenges are also more about luck than skill. Something like clearing 25 objectives in a single outing depends heavily on whether the game happens to serve up quick, easy tasks in a row.

Long ones, extended jumps or full deliveries, eat your whole clock instead. The full campaign of the game runs somewhere around three to four hours, boss fight against the Skeleton King included. It's perfectly happy to let you keep doing runs after the credits roll, though.

The main issue with Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?! is that the truck doesn't really feel like a truck to drive. For the most part it's fine, but it gets stuck on scenery more often than it should- sometimes for no apparent reason at all- and having a dedicated respawn button just to free the vehicle speaks volumes about how often it happens.

Boosts and sideswipes seem to run on invisible cooldowns.

There are stretches where mashing the button does nothing, and you are left waiting for a recharge or simply forced to respawn. Larger jumps occasionally end with the truck coming to a dead stop at an odd angle, feeling more like hitting a physics glitch than landing a stunt.

Steering takes some getting used to as well, and while the developer confirmed button remapping is planned, it wasn't available at launch. On PC, DualSense controllers can randomly lose trigger input mid-run, requiring an unplug or full reset to fix. Playing on Steam Deck brings its own set of problems too, including terrain popping in and out for brief moments and noticeably heavier battery drain than other Steam titles.

The single map is another sticking point. Wenvale is well designed and rewarding to learn, full of shortcuts and potion routes once you've spent enough time in it, but since it's the only place you'll ever drive, runs start to feel repetitive well before the credits roll.

Given the overall short length of the campaign, that repetition doesn't overstay its welcome too badly, but it does mean the appeal leans heavily on liking the core loop itself rather than expecting much variety. There's also a planned costume unlock system sitting visibly on the main menu that wasn't actually functional at launch, arriving instead with a post-release patch, which is an odd choice to leave visible before it's ready.

Visually, Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?! goes for a bright, cartoonish look that suits its tone well.

The game even gives the truck itself a face, which adds a nice bit of character to the bigger jumps and stunts. Background art occasionally glitches out during the dialogue scenes between runs, and there's an odd bit of geometry visible poking out from behind the main map at times, but neither issue gets in the way of actually playing.

On PC, Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?! runs smoothly for the most part, though the Steam Deck experience is noticeably rougher, with pieces of terrain occasionally flickering out of existence for a split second and the battery draining faster than most other games on the handheld.

Despite all of that, there's an odd charm to how unpolished a few corners of the game feel, since it's clearly the product of a small team throwing themselves at a weird idea rather than something churned out by a formula.

The soundtrack stands out as one of the strongest elements across the board. Rather than leaning on the kind of licensed skate-punk soundtrack you might expect from something so clearly inspired by Crazy Taxi, it goes with a mix of original ska and rock tracks that keep pace with the on-screen chaos and give every run a good amount of energy.

Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?! is a scrappy, funny little arcade racer that mostly succeeds at recapturing the specific feeling that made Crazy Taxi fun decades ago.

Something very few of its imitators have managed to pull off. The core loop of smashing through a city while babysitting a tiny RPG fight at the bottom of the screen is genuinely inventive, the writing between the driver and Carissa is funny without dragging on, and the soundtrack carries a lot of the game's energy on its own.

What holds it back is a truck that doesn't always control the way you want it to, a single map that wears thin by the end, and a back half of progression that leans too hard on repetitive grinding instead of new ideas. None of that is enough to sink the game outright, but it does mean it asks you to meet it halfway, to forgive the occasional stuck wheel or wonky landing in exchange for a genuinely funny premise executed with more heart than budget.

It's rough in places, sometimes noticeably so, but there's a real, likable game underneath that roughness, and if Strange Scaffold keeps supporting Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?! with patches, remapping options, and the promised costume unlocks, it's easy to see this becoming something even better down the line.

As it stands at launch, it's an easy recommendation for anyone who wants a short, silly arcade racer to bounce in and out of over a weekend, and a much harder sell for anyone hoping for the kind of depth or variety that could hold up over dozens of hours.