Truck City

No speed control. This is the #1 gripe. Makes the game so much less fun than it could be.
The pause feature is annoying. Can't do actions while paused.
Trucks don't spawn at the spawn point closest to their destination...when they have more than 1 choice. At least not always.

Definitely worth its price, it will keep you entertained for a few sessions. The rest of the review may look negative, but I would not have spent this much time writing down details about something I hate.

Edit: I'm an idiot and accidentally started the game in compatibility mode even though there is a native Linux version.

Early game feels nice but at a larger scale you start to notice a few rough edges. For example, the truck and production lists become hard to navigate when you have more than 20 items because there are no filtering or sorting options.

Traffic and routing and the time that takes is the main bottleneck of a fast city. And that's where my biggest gripes come from.

How does it work? My intuition is that cars have a maximum cost (eg. time to complete) for a task and when they can't find a task they either drive off the map or go to a truck stop. This means that the game boils down to locality and latency optimizations, meaning requesters have to be physically close to providers. Maps impose restrictions through the location of the resources and proximity to the edges of the map for selling and buying.

The only influence you have over routing is the maximum request distance on a factory but I believe a better solution would be to introduce a kind of highway to connect parts of the city that only allow trucks with certain products. Clicking every factory one by one to set the request distance is tedious.

After a while you want to redo parts of the city to optimize but rebuilding doesn't feel great, partially due to my performance issues. It takes too many clicks to select the correct loading dock, which would ideally be a hotkey + select group + select item. It would also be nice if the game could auto-select the correct loading dock when building next to a resource.

Not fun at all.
You cannot control the trucks. And the game does not explain why trucks come or why they leave.
So you will just sit there, watching them say "Hey, nothing to pick up," then leave—while there are plenty of factories waiting for materials.
You have no clue why they keep doing this.
And ... as a simulation game, this one does not even have an option to adjust the simulation speed.

Man I never felt more frustrated trying to understand how a game works more than this. I went through the first tutorial with "Building Placement" 3 times and still didn't understand how building placement works.

The tutorial says "build an outbound warehouse for the Iron mine" and in the menu you can't really find a building like that, because it's named Output warehouse, so you start to think, is this the wrong one? am I looking in the wrong place?. Now you try to find where to put it, but no location is valid, you can place it near the iron mine apparently but just diagonally (i never understood why just diagonally)

Tutorial says "build the loading port to the Iron foundry". you select it from the menu and when you try to place is somewhere error "only one loading port is allowed" - whyyyy, the tutorial is just telling me to place one. Then you try to place it somewhere else and it works. Either the error is wrong or there is a bug.

The tutorial says "build the loading port to a the piping factory" and then no freaking building in the menu (i then realized it's a bug and you need to close the menu and open it again to appear)

I literally didn't understand how the positioning of the building works, looked like i could place the production building even though it doesn't have a connection to the road. (so just need some connection, idk, the game doesn't explain it)

Good luck if you try to understand the game from the graphics. All buildings looks almost the same and the blocky graphics don't help. It took me some time to realize why the crane was not picking the cargo just to realize it's just a static animation and it's actually fine. The crane just moves independently from the cargo object lol.

It don't know if the game is fun or not because I had to give up out of frustration trying to understand it.

Huge huge UX problems you can't go over to enjoy the game sorry.

Fun game, seems deceptively simple but sure isn't.
The developer is actively improving the game and responds well to feedback, which is a big plus for me.
Can use some QoL improvements / polishing, but great game if you can get it <$10.